


The River is everywhere.

by SecondStarOnTheLeft



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Old Kingdom - Garth Nix
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-12-12
Updated: 2014-01-14
Packaged: 2017-11-20 22:27:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 36,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/590333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SecondStarOnTheLeft/pseuds/SecondStarOnTheLeft
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was so easy for Robb and Bran, Abhorsen-in-Waiting and Wallmaker, and for Arya and Rickon who were so clearly warriors, meant for great adventures and great glories.</p><p>And then there was Sansa, who liked dresses which apparently (in Arya’s mind, anyways, and because everyone must listen to every word Arya said, in everyone else’s minds too) meant that she must be no use for anything else at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Abhorsen's Daughter

**Author's Note:**

> For those who are unsure of the details of the Old Kingdom trilogy or who haven't read the books at all, I threw together [this guide](http://fullofstoryshapes.tumblr.com/post/75634114221/for-those-about-to-read) aand that should hopefully explain everything you'll need, I think?

The Clayr’s Glacier was very different to the House or the Tower, Sansa knew that if she knew nothing else. She approved of the bridges, criss-crossing the narrow fury of the newborn River Ratterlin deep down in the gorge, approved of the cleverly hidden marks that would raise sendings should anything Dead or Free Magic prove too strong for the running water to repel.

The Clayr themselves were not what Sansa had hoped for but precisely what her mother had told her to expect. The twinned Voices of the Nine Day Watch greeted her, golden hair gleaming and green eyes flashing.

Mother and Father both had been suspicious of Cersei and Jaime – while it was never acknowledged that the Clayr had divided into warring factions within the Glacier, Sansa knew that they _had,_ and that Cersei and Jaime, powerful in the Sight though they were, were part of the dangerous faction headed by their father who sought to extend the power of the Clayr beyond what had always been theirs. There had been a rumour that their father had even put Cersei forward as a potential bride for the King when he ascended to the throne, but he had chosen Lady Elia (of another faction within the Clayr) and that, too, had apparently created tensions within the Clayr.

“Welcome to the Clayr’s Glacier, little dove,” Cersei said, her smile a brittle thing as cold as the ice she Saw the future in but twice as beautiful. “It is an honour to have a member of the Abhorsen’s family here with us.”

Sansa bit back a sigh of irritation at that – that was all she ever was, as far as anyone was concerned. It was so easy for Robb and Bran, Abhorsen-in-Waiting and Wallmaker, and for Arya and Rickon who were so clearly warriors, meant for great adventures and great glories.

And then there was Sansa, who liked dresses which apparently (in Arya’s mind, anyways, and because everyone _must_ listen to every word Arya said, in everyone else’s minds too) meant that she must be no use for anything else at all. Never mind that Sansa was a better Charter mage than any of her siblings save maybe Bran, better than Father at everything but that strange magic specific to the Wallmakers. Never mind that Sansa was as proficient a swordswoman as possible, given that she was the one pulled away from her lessons and her practice time whenever there was a guest, because of _course_ she couldn’t possibly need to properly learn to wield her sword and should be the one forced to spend hours on end listening to boring men come from Belisaere to ask that Mother take up a place at court, even though that was entirely impossible given how busy she had been in recent years.

(Never mind that Sansa was the only one who was ever given a surcoat of blue silk and silver keys, only silver keys, when even Robb’s keys were quartered with the Wallmaker’s trowel. Sansa had an opinion about that, a theory, one that she kept carefully secret because to say it aloud would be akin to blasphemy within the family.)

“It is a pleasure and an honour to be here,” Sansa said firmly, because it was a pleasure, a pleasure to be somewhere that she would have the luxury of directing her own studies to a large extent. “I am sure I will enjoy my stay.”

Cersei smiled again and beckoned someone from the far side of the great entrance hall.

“My son, Joffrey, will act as your guide,” she said as the boy – man, maybe, he seemed about Sansa’s age even if the set of his mouth was that of a sulky child – came forward. “He will take you to your rooms now, and then perhaps to the Refectory?”

“I ate on the way,” Sansa assured them, “but thank you. The baths, I think, though?”

 

* * *

 

After a thoroughly unpleasant walk with Joffrey (Sansa wondered if he was merely unpleasant for no good reason or if he felt jilted because, as far as Sansa could glean, he was not very powerful in the Sight), they reached her rooms.

The Clayr, Sansa knew, ranked near everyone in order of how strong they were in the Sight, how clear and frequent their visions of the future were – Cersei and Jaime were strong individually, she had heard, but stronger combined, for example – and children were counted as adults as soon as they Awakened, as soon as they were Seen to wear the white robes and silver-and-moonstone circlet of an Awakened Clayr and therefore Seen to have the Sight, regardless of their age. Sansa had heard stories of children of seven or eight Awakening and being treated as adults, while ten, eleven, twelve year old were treated as babes.

Sansa knew how that felt. It was her life every day, seeing Arya being brought along with Mother and Robb when they flew out to fight Dead things because Arya was _strong_ and a gifted swordswoman, whereas Sansa was expected to sit at home in the Abhorsen’s House as though the millions of sendings needed guidance to tend the house and gardens, to do that which they had been created to do.

Sansa sighed with relief when at last she reached the baths, because it was an excuse to rid herself of Joffrey’s uncomfortable company.

“I will find my way back to my rooms myself, thank you,” she said with a smile, expecting him to leave.

Instead, he hesitated.

“It’s been Seen that you marry one of us,” he said. “A Clayr. Me, maybe.”

She blinked in shock, and backed away towards the door.

“I- I am rather young to be marrying,” she joked weakly. “Um. Goodbye.”

She slammed the door before he could speak, stomach churning. Was that the only reason the Clayr had invited her to study in their Library? Because she had been seen wed to one of them and they wanted to choose who it was?

She couldn’t believe that. She refused to believe that she really _was_ nothing more than a pretty face to be used to make people smile, as Arya seemed to think. Only Aunt Lyanna seemed to understand, Aunt Lyanna who had not left the Wallmaker’s Tower on Barhedrin Ridge since she’d borne the King’s bastard son over twenty years before.

Everyone had expected Arya and Aunt Lyanna to be close, Sansa reflected as she stripped off and slid into the gently steaming pool of hot water. Arya looked like the Wallmakers, the dark hair and eyes and the long face, and Father always fondly remembered Aunt Lyanna as being wild, like Arya, before her affair with the King. Arya found Lyanna boring, though, hated that Lyanna would not speak of her life before Jon’s birth, resented her for it. Sansa thought that maybe she understood – Lyanna saw too much of herself in Arya, maybe resented Arya a little for that.

But Aunt Lyanna knew what it was to have one thing expected of you, even if that was not what you wanted for yourself. Sansa had never wanted to be the pretty one, the one who was useless for anything but being sweet. Aunt Lyanna was never as talented at creating as Father and Uncle Brandon, and Sansa knew that her aunt had been betrothed to some man from one of the powerful families in Belisaere, that that had in part prompted Lyanna’s rebelliousness because she hadn’t wanted that life for herself.

Sansa didn’t want the life of a noblewoman, which was all she would have if she married a Clayr and accepted the place her family (and, apparently, the Seers) thought was hers. Sansa wanted to do something of worth, something of note, something that would make her parents look on her with something other than distracted fondness, because she was the quiet one and how could they focus on her when there was Robb and Arya and Bran and Rickon?

When she was dressing, she touched the pattern of silver keys stitched into the cuffs of her deep blue woollen dress and sighed. Arya had sneered at her for that, both for sewing in the first place and for sewing keys but no trowels, but Sansa didn’t care. She’d never felt a Wallmaker at all, so she didn’t see why she should pretend to it – Bran never wore anything stitched with keys, after all, and Arya never belittled him for that.

She checked that she had her knife strapped to her thigh (it would be rude to carry her sword here in the Glacier, after all), called up the marks to dry her hair, and then quickly plaited it and tied it off with silver ribbon.

She gathered up her writing box and smiled.

“To the Library then,” she announced to her empty room, pushing aside her previous train of thought and relishing instead the freedom that was now hers. “To the Library.”

 

* * *

 

The Great Library of the Clayr was famed throughout the land (and beyond it, up into the far north from whence came the barbarian warlords, and even they sent their learned folk south to study in the Clayr’s Library) and, now that she was here, Sansa could see why.

She knew that it was shaped like a nautilus shell, a spiral that sloped ever deeper and wider into the mountain that they Clayr had made their home in (she’d often wondered why the glacier and the mountains that held it were altogether called the Clayr’s Glacier, considering the mountains had perfectly serviceable names of their own, Starmount and Sunfall).  She knew that it was considered the greatest repository of knowledge in the known world.

She just hadn’t expected it to be quite so _large,_ somehow.

“You must be the Abhorsen’s daughter. Welcome to the Library.”

She spun in surprise, casting about only to find…

“Yes, I am a dwarf,” the little man with the mop of untidy white-blonde hair said with a smile, holding out a hand. “Deputy Librarian Tyrion. I believe you met my brother and sister, and my detestable nephew…?”

Sansa shook his hand, casting a glance at his gleaming white waistcoat before his words struck her.

“Sansa,” she offered. “Cersei and Jaime…?”

“Yes, my older siblings,” he said with something that was neither smile nor frown but somehow both as well. “And Joffrey was assigned as your guide, I believe, but you are somehow free of him.” He shrugged then, motioned for her to follow him. “Come, come – you are free to study as you choose, of course, provided you don’t attempt to access the lower levels, but you will need someone to help you find your way around until you get used to the cross-referencing system we have in place.”

They emerged from the main spiral of the library into a huge, high-ceilinged chamber lined with more bookshelves than Sansa had ever seen, more books and knowledge than she had ever hoped to have access to.

“This is the main Reading Room,” Tyrion told her, gesturing for her to walk on ahead of him. “You’ll become used to us Librarians running about, I suppose – more than a week and I suppose you’ll pick up our shift rotations. Some of us will be in and out at seemingly random intervals for Watch business, and… Oh, the gong will sound for mealtimes. I don’t think there’s anything else, really. Here’s your guide now.”

Her guide was a man several years her senior, as tall as Tyrion was small, with a shock of unruly chestnut-brown curls and a blue waistcoat (Abhorsen blue, she noted absently, just like that waistcoat is Wallmaker yellow and that one is Royal red).

“Tyrion?” he said, rising with the help of a long cane (rowan, Sansa thought, it looked like rowan, useful for binding Free Magic things and Dead things). “How might I help?”

“This is Sansa,” Tyrion said. “She is here to study with us.”

The man held out his free hand and smiled shyly, his hair falling forward over his brow.

“A pleasure,” he said warmly. “I am First Assistant Librarian Willas. Welcome to the Library.”

Sansa smiled back. She thought she might come to like the Clayr’s Library very much.

 

* * *

 

It was hard work, in some ways, because no matter how Willas protested he couldn’t manage all the books she wanted as well as his cane, so she found herself lugging enormous tomes up the spiral to the Reading Room because she always worried that the sendings would have more important things to do.

He was very helpful, as was Tyrion – it was delightful that they didn’t judge her in relation to her mother, her father, her brothers, but rather as one more scholar (because even without their physical limitations, Sansa was certain both Tyrion and Willas would spend most of their time in the Library just because they enjoyed knowledge) who enjoyed their domain as much as they did.

The other librarians were a mix of that attitude and the one Sansa had feared – some of them seemed to defer to her because of who her parents were, some seemed to expect her to have revelatory knowledge of combative or creative magic, some scorned her for being neither Abhorsen-in-Waiting nor a Wallmaker.

And some, like Tyrion’s nephew, pursued her because of this damned vision the Nine Day Watch had had of her wedding a man in Clayr green-and-silver. She’d asked Willas and Tyrion about it, had found Tyrion had been in the Watch that day (he often was, she’d noticed, because his Sight was very strong), and she’d been told that that was literally all that had been seen – her hand tied with a man’s hand, a man wearing green edged with silver nine-pointed stars.

“It might not even be a marriage, then!” she exclaimed, throwing up her hands in frustration. “There are magics that require handfasting, old magics but who knows, mayhaps we will have need of them?”

“I tried to tell them,” Tyrion said, rolling his eyes, “but they were quite insistent, and of course the rumour spread despite Watch business being supposed to _remain_ Watch business.”

“Every young man in the Glacier has been clamouring to meet you since you arrived,” Willas added, looking at her over the top of his book. “The Library hasn’t been so busy in years.”

Sansa gritted her teeth, tears of anger stinging her eyes.

“I can speak with Grandfather if it is bothering you,” Willas offered, setting aside his books and moving to stand. “I’m sure there’s something he can do-“

“No!” Sansa insisted, waving him back down. Willas’ grandfather was Chief Librarian, and if there was anyone who could keep fools who thought to marry her away it would be him, but Sansa did not want to cause trouble – she could ignore them, just as she had always ignored Arya’s jibes and Bran’s attempts at bolstering her spirits which, while well intentioned, had often left her feeling miserable and guilty. “No, it is… It is not a problem.”

It became a problem as she noticed the idiots trying to woo her for the first time – woo her with gifts of roses and pretty scraps of handkerchiefs and hair ribbons, all in colours she didn’t like and patterns that annoyed her. There hadn’t been anyone with the right to wear silver keys and stars together since the Abhorsen Lirael, over two centuries ago, and their foolishness in presuming to have the right to do so just because her sigil was the key and, if she married a Clayr – _if –_ his sigil would be the stars…

“A Remembrancer,” she gasped as the realisation struck her while she lay half-asleep in bed. “If I wed a Clayr, my children could be _Remembrancers.”_

Remembrancers were rarer even than unions between Clayr and Abhorsen, because not every such match resulted in a Remembrancer – born of Future and Death, with the ability to See the past. In fact, Sansa only knew of one such child.

Abhorsen Lirael, raised a Clayr to become an Abhorsen the likes of which had rarely been seen. She who broke the Destroyer, only to later wed Its host. Goldenhand.

Sansa’s great-times-several grandmother.

“A Remembrancer,” Tyrion said thoughtfully when she raised the issue with him. “Do you know, I hadn’t even considered that? But I suppose it would be a crossing of the necessary bloodlines… Intriguing.”

“Has it been Seen?” Sansa asked fretfully, the idea of her whole life being laid out before her that way making her feel sick. The idea that she was nothing more than a means to an end, a producer for the next Remembrancer, it made her wonder – what if Arya was right? What if she _was_ meant for nothing more than marriage?

“I do not know,” Tyrion admitted. “There are… tensions among the Clayr, Sansa, and regardless of how separate I keep myself from my siblings and my father, I am not told everything – it may have been Seen when I was not in the Watch. I do not know.”

She sat down heavily, wrapping her arms around herself.

“What am I?” she asked bitterly. “My brother is Abhorsen-in-Waiting, though he refuses to believe that study is as important as training and has only survived thus far through Mother’s skill and sheer dumb luck. My other brother is the finest Wallmaker since Prince Sameth, and my sister and our youngest brother are so gifted with the martial arts that they could have served in the Royal Guard since they were ten or eleven, or at least so says my uncle. What am I? A breeding mare?”

“Clever,” Tyrion said enigmatically, and then he left her to her reading.

 

* * *

 

Mother wrote regularly to ask how Sansa’s studies were progressing, and Bran wrote near as often to ask her to look up this or that or the other. She much preferred Bran’s letters, if only because there was no intimation that she was misbehaving in her brother’s letters.

Mother had been against Sansa coming to the Glacier, had been right from the moment the message hawk had arrived at the House. Arya had been jealous, had pitched a fit that had caused Mother to raise her voice – a rare occurrence – and Robb had been offended that the Clayr had never explicitly offered him the use of the Library as they usually did to all Abhorsens and Abhorsens-in-Waiting.

Father had been anxious, wary of leaving her alone with the Clayr, many of whom he distrusted so much (partially, Sansa thought, because of their failure to See what was to transpire between Aunt Lyanna and the King). Bran had been elated on her behalf, though, the only one to be happy for her to have an opportunity to do something for herself.

Mother’s letters always, always asked when Sansa was coming home, when she was going to be done with her “studies” (the scepticism was implied, if never explicit), when she was going to leave the Clayr and return to her rightful place.

Sansa did not want to return to the Abhorsen’s House, the home she had known all her life, that island on the waterfall at the Long Cliffs, that prison, because the only other place she had ever been was the Wallmaker’s Tower. Her brothers and sister had all seen more, done more, even Rickon who was barely more than a child, because he travelled with Bran when Bran went on his trips.

“It is almost as if they don’t trust me,” she grumbled under her breath as she shot arrow after arrow to try and vent her frustration. “As if they think I’m too weak or silly to be left alone-“

“Well, you are talking to yourself.”

She spun, arrow still poised for release, and quickly lowered her bow when she saw it was Willas standing behind her, a book bound in strange grey-white leather under his arm.

“I- Um. Pardon me-“

“It’s no trouble,” he told her with a smile. “I only came looking for you because I thought this might interest you – a book of particular historical interest.”

She looked up at him curiously, but he only smiled and held out the book.

“It’s handwritten?” she said, frowning as she turned the pages. “But-“

“It’s a journal,” he said. “Apparently, according to my research, it belonged to Nicholas Sayre – Lirael Goldenhand’s husband.”

Sansa’s head snapped up, and she couldn’t help but laugh.

“Surely not-“

“We have some samples of his handwriting – verified ones, I mean, ones that he signed – and I’ve compared this journal to those…”

“Why are you so interested in them?” she asked, flipping through, breath catching when she saw Wallmaker marks and marks used to ward against the taint of the Free Magic used in Death to cross the Precincts, and strange marks that she didn’t recognise that were cited as possible alternatives to those same Free Magic spells.

“He liked to understand how things worked,” Willas said, and when she looked up he was blushing under his beard. “I can relate to that, somewhat. I often wonder what it is that directs and guides the Sight, but given present tensions, it is unlikely I will ever be allowed to study anyone besides myself and my few volunteers to try and understand.”

Sansa crossed the yard (yard, they said, yards did not have ceilings) and sat down on the bench along the wall, entranced by the book Willas had given her.

“You’d like my brother,” she offered absently. “Bran. I sometimes think that being a Wallmaker is less about creating things and more about taking them apart to find out why they do what they do. When we were small, he wanted to break apart Mother’s bells to try and figure out why the Abhorsen’s bells must be forged in a Charter fire in Death.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?”

Sansa laughed.

“Danger has never worried-“

She stopped, fingers tracing over a sketch of a woman with long dark hair and large dark eyes sitting by the telescope in the Observatory in the House. Sansa knew the shape of her fingers, the slant of her cheekbones, the tilt of her head, because they were the same as her own.

“Lirael Goldenhand,” she breathed.

“You look quite like her,” Willas said, obviously surprised. “Your colouring is different, but otherwise you are quite like her.”

“She is my ancestress,” Sansa pointed out, turning the page only to find another sketch of the same woman, this time with a child with fair hair (well, uncoloured, so she assumed fair) balanced on her hip, standing right on the very edge of the island on which the Abhorsen’s House stood, looking down the Long Cliffs through the mist of the waterfall. “Arielle, too,” she added, touching the child’s face.

There were several pages of sketches – Nicholas Sayre had obviously taken great pleasure in capturing his wife and children and in-laws on paper – and then more strange marks, made-up marks and combinations of marks she knew and so many marks she didn’t know at all-

“Arya cast that mark once,” Sansa said, tracing the familiar and forbidden shape with the tip of her finger. “It nearly killed her. She spent three weeks in bed, and she couldn’t speak for three times as long. Mother and Father were amazed she survived, and half the library in the House was locked to us from then on.”

“A great tragedy for you, I imagine,” Willas teased, taking a seat at her side. “All that knowledge at your fingertips, and yet also miles away, somehow.”

“I was never encouraged into the library as my brothers and Arya were,” Sansa said without thinking, breath catching once more as she saw her own Charter mark drawn there on the page.

Willas traced the mark this time, long fingers barely touching the vellum page.

“That is a great shame,” he said softly, and when she looked up he was blushing again. “I think there are great unplumbed depths within you, Sansa.”

“Why do you work in the Library, Willas?” she asked suddenly, snapping the book shut. “You are so clever, surely there is other work…?”

He was shaking his head already, a small bitter smile that Sansa thought she recognised from her mirror tugging at his lips.

“I was a Paperwing pilot,” he said. “That’s what happened my leg – a storm came down while I was on patrol out north, and my Paperwing crashed. The Queen’s younger brother, Oberyn, was with me, but I was flying the thing so I took the worst of the crash – Oberyn has an impressive scar from some of the fuselage cutting into his side, but he’s still allowed to fly. I was forbidden from ever taking to the air again.”

“I didn’t know.”

“How could you? I have never spoken of it to you. If I were stronger in the Sight – say, as strong as my youngest brother or my sister – it would have been a worse thing for the Clayr, because they might have lost someone valuable. There are so many of us that worrying about one reasonably strong individual among many is not something that we need to do.”

“That’s terrible!”

“That’s how life is here in the Glacier,” he said with a shrug. “Tyrion has always wondered if he would ever have made it past Third Assistant Librarian had he not been as strong as he is in the Sight.”

“Is he very strong?”

“As strong as his brother and sister, I think, but I am no expert on such things. He Sees many things that escape the Watch, though – he says that it is because of his height, that it gives him a different perspective.”

Sansa smiled at the joke, stroked her fingers over the cover of the book in her lap, and sighed.

“He was the one who Saw you, you know,” Willas said. “Both coming to the Library and… And the rest. The handfasting. His father was furious when he found out that I knew – I was with Tyrion when he had the vision.”

“He- What did he actually See? Did he See anything that might have given any hint as to who it was with me?”

Willas shrugged. “He didn’t even See anything to really say it was your wedding – the ribbons for the handfasting were hidden under your sleeves, so they may not even have been handfasting ribbons at all.”

“Gold and white,” she said softly, thinking of the braid of ribbon that her mother wore tied around her bandoleer, between Saraneth and Astarael, a narrow braid of gold and white ribbon to match the other half, the half Father wore threaded through the spare loops of his sword belt. “They could have been anything at all, then? If they couldn’t be seen?”

“Anything,” Willas assured her. “Tyrion said all he Saw was you holding someone’s hand, and whoever it was wore Clayr green edged with our stars, and they were male.”

Sansa frowned down at the floor, at her slippers peeking out from under the hem of her dress.

“It is not that I do not wish to marry,” she said quietly. “It is just that I wish to be more than just a wife.”

“I can understand that,” Willas said, just as quietly. “My sister, Margaery – she is the most powerful of us four in the Sight, but she would like to be more than just a Clayr, if that makes sense. I would like it too, if I could manage it – I would like to have something for myself. Being a Clayr… It reduces your individuality to some extent. We are told to model ourselves on our ancestors, but how can we when we are being pushed to be politically active beyond the Glacier? The Clayr of the past offered guidance, but did not attempt to guide as my father and grandmother or Tywin and the twins do. We are not the Clayr of the past, and that is both good and bad, I think, but it is foolish that we’re somehow expected to be what my father wants of us and what our ancestors were.”

He blushed again.

“Pardon me,” he said. “I got rather carried away, didn’t I?”

“It is no trouble,” Sansa said, patting his hand. “It is nice to have someone agree with me. I feel as though I am not able to say such things at home. Mother would be upset if she thought I was unhappy, and none of them would believe me if I said that I thought the bells weren’t-“

She clenched her mouth shut, turning away with her cheeks burning. She could not say that, could not finish that thought, because it was wrong and not allowed.

“The bells weren’t?” Willas prompted, and because this was something she’d hidden for so long, and he’d been so kind in the near three months since she’d arrived at the Glacier, she hoped that she could trust him. She needed to tell someone, needed to know that she wasn’t mad.

“The bells weren’t meant for Robb,” she whispered. “He- the sendings laid out the bells at the House, and everyone assumed that they were meant for Robb because he is the eldest and has never shown any great talent for Father’s type of magic, but he- I know that he-“

“Sansa-“

“Robb hasn’t read the Book of the Dead the whole way through,” she blurted out. “It unnerves him, he says he can’t read it, but he _must_ if he is to be Abhorsen someday.”

“Well, mayhaps he _will_ read it-“

“Sansa?”

They both turned to the door, and Sansa briefly wondered if Willas felt as flustered as she did herself before focusing on the beautiful woman with night-dark hair and rich dark eyes in the white robes, silver-and-moonstones glistening on her brow, a long ivory-tipped wand in her hand.

The Voice of the Nine Day Watch.

“There is a letter for you, Sansa,” Arianne said, holding out a folded piece of parchement sealed with the keys. “Your mother.”

Sansa guessed that the Watch must have seen what was in this letter and that is must have been important – why else would the Voice be delivering it to her personally? – so she stood and took it and bowed just slightly before turning away to open it.

_You must come home._

_Robb is dead._

_Mother says come quickly._

_Arya._

* * *

 

“My condolences,” Tyrion said, and Sansa paused in packing up her things in the Library to thank him.

“I don’t know… I don’t know what happened yet,” she said quietly. “Arya’s letter only said that I’m to come home right away, that Robb is… Well.”

“You will learn when you reach home,” he offered. “How are you to travel?”

“I’ve been offered the use of a Paperwing, and a pilot – Willas’ brother volunteered, I think. The youngest one.”

“Ah, Loras,” Tyrion said with a grin, hefting himself up onto the chair beside her. “He is a good pilot – as good as Willas was, maybe. Of course, he’s also an arrogant little shit, so ignore most of what he says.”

“He volunteered,” Sansa said, “but he will not be flying me south. The present Voice’s brother will – Quentyn, I think?”

Tyrion blinked in surprise at that, and then smiled bitterly.

“My brother probably volunteered as well, or my nephew? They’re still competing over you – I wish that I’d never Seen you, you know. Chances are you wouldn’t have been invited here if I hadn’t, and-“

“Then I am glad you Saw me,” she said firmly, snapping her case shut. “Thank you, Tyrion – you have been kinder than there was any need for you to be.”

“I was as kind as you deserved and no more,” he corrected. “The Great Library of the Clayr will always be open to you, Sansa.”

She touched his hand and smiled in final farewell, and then she left. She had a sinking feeling that it would be a very long while before she could return to the Library.

 

* * *

 

As it turned out, Tyrion’s nephew _was_ the one to pilot the Paperwing that was to bring Sansa home – she almost asked if she could sail down the Ratterlin instead, anything to avoid spending time alone with Joffrey, who had the unnerving habit of just _watching_ her all of the time, and only speaking to paint himself as considerably more attractive than he actually was.

Sansa had seen enough of him to be sure that he wasn’t attractive at all, beyond his lovely golden-blonde hair. He was cruel to the children (easy to spot in their blue tunics), particularly the older ones who hadn’t yet Awakened, and behaved as though he were considerably more important than his strength in the Sight actually made him just because his mother was so often Voice of the Nine Day Watch, and his grandfather was envoy to the King.

Tyrion and Willas had both come to see her off, and she was surprised by how much she was going to miss them – it had been nice to have friends who didn’t see her mother or Robb when they looked at her. Joffrey sneered at his uncle when he saw who Sansa was saying goodbye to, and ignored Willas, so Sansa ignored him until he called for her to climb aboard the Paperwing.

Tyrion had told Sansa how rarely Joffrey was actually called up to the Watch (he was a terrible gossip-monger, him and Willas both, and Sansa was sure she knew more about the Clayr than the Clayr themselves did), and she knew that that meant that he was quite weak – not that it stopped him bumming and blowing about all the things he’d Seen, shouting back at her over the wind as they flew south.

(He’d forgotten to whistle up a wind, so Sansa did that for him while he was distracted.)

 

* * *

 

“You’ll miss her,” Tyrion said to Willas as they stood on the landing platform and watched as Sansa and Joffrey disappeared into the sky. “I think you might be a little in love with her.”

Willas laughed, shielded his eyes against the sun with one hand and flexed his other hand on the top of his cane.

“If only it were just a little, Tyrion,” he said. “Or that she wasn’t quite so oblivious to my feelings. Come on, then – it’s bloody cold up here. I have a bottle of that disgustingly alcoholic brandy they make near Roble’s Town that’s crying out to be shared. Fancy a dram?”

“If by dram, you mean half a bottle, then alright,” Tyrion said with a grin. “I’ll try and convince you to write a love letter and send it to the Abhorsen’s House while we’re drunk.”

“I’ll shoot you if you do.”

 

* * *

 

It took them near a full day to reach the Long Cliffs, and then Joffrey far overshot the island and had to circle back around from the south, which meant Sansa had to frantically whistle the wind into compliance so they were actually able to land at the Abhorsen’s House.

For all her talk of wanting to escape, Sansa was glad to be home in some ways – doubly so when she saw the yellow-and-gold Paperwings that meant Father’s family were here, come from the Wallmaker’s Tower to bid Farewell to Robb.

But, unfortunately, she couldn’t expect Joffrey to turn right around and leave for the Glacier again as soon as she’d taken her things from the Paperwing, so she had to invite him inside for food and offer him a bed for the night.

“This way,” she said tiredly, swinging her bags up onto her shoulders and carrying her writing case against her chest, ignoring the ache of her shoulders from hunching in the back of the Paperwing for so many hours. “We’ll not cut through the gardens, I’m in no humour to hack through the roses.”

“Surely they cannot be so untended?”

“They guard Astarael’s Well,” Sansa said shortly. “And it is never wise to risk waking her.” Sansa did not mention that Astarael had not woken since the Destroyer’s coming, not unless someone was foolish enough to venture down into her well. “We will not cut through the roses. We will stay on the paths – the lawns are probably muck at the moment, after the spring rains.”

Joffrey scowled and retrieved his own bag, following her with his head down and shoulders slumped petulantly. She sighed with relief as they turned the corner onto the main path, as they came within sight of the front door.

She might have complained about wanting to escape, about feeling trapped and unvalued here, but the Abhorsen’s House always had been and always would be Sansa’s home, and nothing could change that.

The door opened just as she reached it, and she dipped her head in greeting to the sending behind it before turning towards the stairs.

“Mother?” she called. “Father? I’m home!”

 

* * *

 

Nobody seemed entirely certain how to react to Joffrey, who was as brashly over-confident here as he was in the Glacier, and Sansa had to explain in whispers to Father just precisely who he was.

Aunt Lyanna and Bran seemed happiest of everyone to see her – Mother was full of anger, Sansa could see that, although she wasn’t sure why precisely that was, and she and Arya had never managed to get along for more than half an hour, and Father as usual was trying to keep a leash on Arya and Rickon. Sansa had always been slightly frightened of her grandfather and her uncles, intimidated by the incredible feats of magic of which they were capable, but even they were happier to see her than Arya, and Mother’s brother and sister and nephew would not be arriving till morning.

Mother disappeared early in the evening, but Sansa knew where she would be – so she ignored how tired she was, made the long climb up and up and up to the Observatory, and then stood awkwardly just beyond the trap door, watching Mother stare blindly down the telescope, pointed out over the cliffs.

“He died fighting a Shadow Hand,” Mother said, and Sansa shuddered at the thought of those creatures, Dead spirits not bound by a corpse to house them and strong enough to withstand all but the brightest sunshine. “He… He needed to use either Kibeth or Ranna with Saraneth, but he wouldn’t draw his bells. He kept using Charter spells against them…”

The Abhorsen’s bells were the hallmark of their trade – seven bells of a metal that wasn’t quite silver, ranging in size from a pillbox to the palm of Sansa’s hand. Bells of spelled metal, metal that contained Free Magic within Charter magic, that took a necromancer’s power over Death and the Dead and inverted it, made it a tool for good rather than darkness.

Seven bells. Ranna, the Sleeper, smallest and sweetest of the bells, which soothed the listener into slumber. Mosrael, the Waker, which seesawed the wielder into Death while swinging Dead spirits into life – Sansa had never known her mother to wield Mosrael. It was a necromancer’s bell, with no real use for an Abhorsen, but an incomplete set of bells was a dangerous thing. Kibeth was the Walker, used to give movement to Dead in the hands of a necromancer and to make the Dead return to Death by an Abhorsen. Dyrim was a strange bell, used to give speech or take it away, called the Talker. Belgaer, Thinker, had the same effect on the mind, able to restore thought and memory or remove it completely. Saraneth was the favoured bell of all Abhorsens, strong and steady, the Binder, so useful in their work.

And the last bell, the Sorrowful, the Weeper. Astarael, who cast all who heard her far, far into Death when rung properly.

“Mother-“

“The sendings took Robb’s bells,” Mother said absently, still staring blindly into the mist and fog of the waterfall. “I imagine they will be given to- to whichever of you is to take his place after his Farewell.”

 _Given to Arya,_ Sansa thought bitterly. _That is what you were going to say, isn’t it?_

“He was… You cannot see him before his Farewell,” Mother said after a long moment. “I was fighting the necromancer, and Robb… I was too late.”

Sansa’s stomach twisted both with horror at how terrible Robb’s corpse must be and with sympathy for Mother – she and Robb had always been so close, so alike, and for her to see him so, for her to outlive him…

“I am sorry, Mother,” she said gently, crossing the room and wrapping her arms around Mother. “We will all miss Robb.”

“Death is a part of life,” Mother said, hugging Sansa back. “It was… It was Robb’s time. We may miss him, but we must not mourn him.”

“We are of the Abhorsen’s line,” Sansa agreed.

“Still,” Mother said bracingly, pulling away and straightening up. “You are home now. We will have Robb’s Farewell tomorrow, and then… Then we will go on, as we always do. Death waits for no one, and so we must not delay.”

Sansa stayed in the Observatory, the highest room in the tower on the southern face of the House, a room that at first glance appeared to have no walls but upon further investigation did indeed have walls of some queer clear material that swam with Charter marks, showing the magic that had gone into making it, that had sustained it these hundreds of years since the House had been built. Sansa had always liked the Observatory, had liked coming up here to look at the stars with Father and Bran when she was younger.

Sansa cast one glance skyward, picking out the Reaper, and then turned to climb back down into the House proper. She’d probably done something to offend Arya in the scant two hours since her arrival, anyways.

 

* * *

 

Joffrey left early the following morning, directly after breakfast, and not without one last ditch attempt to convince Sansa that he had been the one Tyrion Saw holding her hand.

“My family are powerful allies to have,” he added, not bothering to keep his voice down and ensuring that she would have to explain everything to her parents. “Do not turn down my proposal lightly.”

“I am turning it down because we would be a poor match,” Sansa said tightly. “Goodbye, Joffrey. Thank you for flying me home.”

He scowled fiercely and climbed up into the cockpit without looking back. She was not sorry to see him go.

“What did he mean, “I could be the one you were Seen with,” Sansa?” Father asked, wrapping an arm around her shoulders and guiding her back towards the House. “Did the Clayr See you…?”

“They did,” she admitted. “I was Seen holding the hand of someone wearing a green surcoat edged with nine-pointed stars. It… It looked like a handfasting, according to the Clayr who Saw it.”

“You sound doubtful.”

“I was pursued by many _eligible_ young Clayr while I was studying in the Library,” she said wryly, a bitter smile twisting her mouth. “They think a marriage to the Abhorsen’s daughter would be… Useful, I think.”

“Possibly the Abhorsen-in-Waiting,” Father said, but there was a teasing tone in his voice that showed his disbelief in that possibility, which annoyed Sansa. “You’re too good for him, anyways. There’s a sort of a wrongness about him, as if he was made badly. Your grandfather felt it last night at dinner, and Bran as well.”

Sansa frowned at that, wondering how a person could be badly made – and Joffrey was a person, bearing an uncorrupted Charter mark, else he would never have been able to cross the wards that bounded the House – as Father guided her up the steps to the front door.

“Arya has taken Robb’s death badly,” he said quietly. “Be gentle with her, please?”

“She should have better control of herself,” Sansa said firmly. “She is not a child anymore, Father – she is nineteen years old, and she has Abhorsen blood. Rickon is taking it better than her, as far as I can see.”

“Arya-“

“Is in a mood because the sendings did not leave Robb’s bells in her room this morning when they were laying out her clothes,” Sansa said. “She assumes that she will be Abhorsen-in-Waiting, and is angry that the sendings have not confirmed that yet.”

“It is not just the sendings-“

“Oh, they always know,” Sansa said, waving a careless hand. “Everyone knows that, Father. Uncle Brynden wasn’t Great-Grandmother’s natural heir, and nobody would have chosen him _as_ her heir at the time, but he was her Abhorsen-in-Waiting because the sendings marked him out, not Grandfather, and Brynden was an excellent Abhorsen till the day he died.”

“You feel very strongly about this.”

“I just think Arya is being brattish. Mother herself said that the new Abhorsen-in-Waiting will be chosen after Robb’s Farewell, but Arya is being Arya, which means she is being impatient.”

“That is not always a bad thing,” Aunt Lyanna called as she descended the stairs. “But I am inclined to agree with Sansa in this instance.”

“Lya-“

“Take it from someone who understands impetuousness, Ned,” Lyanna said with a small, grim smile. “It will not serve Arya well.”

Father flinched at the memory of Lyanna’s “impetuousness,” and while he was thus distracted, Lyanna looped her arm through Sansa’s and pulled her towards the dining hall.

“Arya will behave,” Lyanna promised. “My Jon is watching her.”

“How funny that _I_ am the one told to be gentle, instead of Arya being told to behave as befits her blood,” Sansa grumbled. “She may be entirely wild, Aunt Lya, but she _is_ half-Abhorsen-“

“I know, sweet girl,” Lyanna soothed, “but she has been indulged, just as I was. Give her time – she will mature either all at once or never at all.”

Sansa had never dared ask the truth of her aunt’s affair with the King, twenty-five years ago and buried in the Kingdom’s past so thoroughly that there were some who didn’t even know who Jon’s father was, but she knew that the girl her father spoke of before Jon’s birth was very different to the woman Sansa knew.

“Have some tea,” Lyanna said, pouring a cup for each of them and pressing Sansa’s into her hand. “Sansa, I know that you find it difficult here sometimes, but.. Be patient.”

“I am _always_ patient.”

“I know that, sweetheart, but… I do understand better than you think, Sansa. Arya might have my foolhardiness, but you have more than a touch of my arrogance. I ran away and ended up with the shame of the realm on my shoulders and a fatherless son in my arms. I don’t want you to make a similar mistake.”

They drank their tea in silence, and then it was time to go.

Time for Robb’s Farewell.

 

* * *

 

Far away to the north and the east, in a city built on hills, in a palace of light and laughter, a King looks up from an ancient scroll with the light of revelation in his violet-blue eyes.

“I must write to the Abhorsen,” he announced, standing up. “At once, I must write her to now.”

His Queen, small and lithe and cinnamon-skinned, looked up sceptically.

“She has just lost her son, Rhaegar,” Elia said cautiously. “Surely whatever it is that has struck you can wait?”

“No!” Rhaegar declared, striding up and down before the huge window that overlooked Belisaere, capital city of the Old Kingdom. “No, I must- Aegon must marry one of her daughters!”

“What?! Rhaegar-“

“We must combine all four bloodlines!” he exclaimed, a feverish light in his eyes that Elia had not seen in twenty-five years, since he had taken the Wallmaker girl and pursued the now-Aborsen, in his attempt to create some sort of saviour for whatever it was he thought was to come. “All four in one person – Clayr and royal from Aegon, Wallmaker and Abhorsen from one of the Abhorsen’s daughters. Surely you see it too, Elia?”

 _I can see a brilliant man brought to madness by his obsession,_ Elia thought darkly, but she said nothing. She would write to her brothers and ask if the Clayr had seen anything of this new foolishness of Rhaegar’s, and maybe they would know how best to avert another crisis.

 

* * *

 

Robb’s ashes mixed with the mist thrown up by the waterfall as it hurled itself over the cliffs, and Mother’s hands shook as she sketched the marks for the final blessing in the air. Sansa stood a little way back, between Father and Bran, holding tight to Bran’s hand.

“Go beyond the Ninth Gate, and do not tarry,” Mother intoned, and they all echoed her words.

She called for them to wait a moment before they went back inside, and they stood in the cool damp air on the tiny skirt of land outside the walls that protected the House and gardens.

“Tomorrow, I suspect the sendings will lay out bells for my heir,” she said, eyes flashing to Arya and away. “I do not want to hear a single word about it until then. Am I understood?”

Arya scowled and pouted, clearly put out that she could not boast of her _inevitable_ ascension to Abhorsen-in-Waiting, but she did not argue with Mother.

Sansa followed Bran to his workshop on the south lawn (built by Prince Sameth over two centuries past, first of the new Wallmakers) and sat with him for the rest of the day, him telling her stories of his adventures far to the south, in the Wallmaker’s Tower and along the Borderlands, her telling him stories of her time in the far north, in the Clayr’s Glacier and their wonderful Library.

 

* * *

 

Bran was late down to breakfast the following morning (he hadn’t meant to stay up quite so late, but he’d found a book on construction magic while he and Sansa were poking about the Library and-), and was surprised to find only one of his sisters present.

“Is Sansa not down yet?” he asked. “Unlike her.”

“She’s probably sulking over something,” Arya said with a smile before biting into her sausage. “You know how she is.”

Bran sometimes wondered if his sisters knew each other at all – Sansa was sulking, yes, but Bran thought he might sulk too, if he was overlooked entirely in Rickon’s favour the way Mother had overlooked Sansa for Arya every time she mentioned the new Abhorsen-in-Waiting. Arya was in a good mood this morning, despite apparently not having been given bells, because nobody else seemed to have been given bells, either.

“I’m going to look for her,” he declared, pushing away from the table. “It _isn’t_ like her to miss breakfast.”

“I’ll come with you,” Aunt Lya volunteered, and of course as soon as she stood up so did Uncle Brandon and Jon. “She wouldn’t have gone for a walk, would she?”

“I don’t know,” Bran admitted. “Maybe one of you checks the gardens, someone else check the library and her room, and I’ll check the Observatory?”

“Is she likely to be there?” Uncle Brandon asked sceptically. “The library, yes, but the Observatory?”

“I’ll check it and see,” Bran said calmly. “It won’t take long.”

So he climbed up and up, four sets of stairs curling around the tower, then up the ladder to the trapdoor and into the Observatory.

Sansa was sitting in the middle of the floor, a bandoleer of seven bells and creamy-looking leather strapped across her chest, a book bound in greenish leather with tarnished silver clasps balanced in her hands.

“Abhorsen-in-Waiting,” Bran called respectfully, “you’re missing breakfast.”

She glanced up, smiled, and looked back to the book.

“I’ll be down in a moment,” she promised, her voice distant. She was frowning just slightly as she said, “I remember the book differently.”

The book in her hands was the Book of the Dead, the Abhorsen’s guidebook – a grimoire of sorts, containing all the spells needed to safely traverse Death, the methods of binding Dead and Free Magic creatures to your will with the bells, every scrap of knowledge collected by all the Abhorsens on necromancy and counter-necromancy since the Beginning.

A book that could only be opened by someone with an innate knowledge of necromancy, of Death-magic, and closed by a Charter mage with an unsullied mark. It was considered the most dangerous book in the world, spelled to blind and burn and bind any who tried to open it in the wrong.

And Sansa had apparently read it before.

“You’ve known from the moment Robb died that you would be Abhorsen-in-Waiting,” Bran guessed, folding his legs and sitting down in front of her.

“I’ve never had any Wallmaker in me,” Sansa said absently, turning one wafery page and humming in interest. “Is it really so surprising that I am Abhorsen-in-Waiting?”

Bran considered it, considered everything he knew of his sisters and remaining brother, and realised that no, it wasn’t surprising at all that Sansa was heir to their mother’s office.

“I suppose not,” he admitted. “Would you like me to send up some breakfast for you?”

“I’ll be down in a short while,” she promised. “I’ve been here since before dawn – I’m almost finished.”

Brandon, Lyanna and Jon were all standing at the bottom of the main staircase when Bran made his way back down, looking worried.

“She was in the Observatory,” he said with a smile. “She’ll be down in a little while – she has some reading to do.”

 

* * *

 

Sansa descended from the sanctuary of the Observatory slowly, the Book of the Dead tucked into the pouch on the belt the sendings had left for her, the bandoleer heavy, but not uncomfortably so, across her chest.

Her skirts swirled around her ankles as she skipped down the stairs, one arm pressed across the bells lest they make a sound. There was no need to wear the bandoleer here in the House – no Dead thing could cross the boundaries, she knew that, everyone knew that – not without the Abhorsen’s permission, at least.

Still, Sansa had no intention of taking off her bandoleer – her bells – just yet. It was… She felt horribly guilty for thinking it, but it was confirmation of what she’d suspected since Robb had first laid claim to the bells, nearly five years ago. _They were meant for me, not for him._

The whole family – all her uncles, both her aunts, Grandfather Rickard, Mother and Father, her brothers and Arya and Jon and Robin – were all in the dining hall when she walked in, intending to find something to eat.

Arya, of course, was the first to notice the bandoleer, and her face paled.

“Why are _you_ wearing that?” she demanded, standing up so sharply that she knocked her chair over.

“I wanted to know if it was as heavy as it looked,” Sansa said. “It’s not, which is a relief – I always wondered if the bandoleer made fighting or shooting uncomfortable or difficult, but I can’t see that it would.”

“Don’t you know how dangerous it is?!” Arya shouted. “You’re not Abhorsen, you shouldn’t-“

“I _am_ Abhorsen-in-Waiting, though,” Sansa said calmly. “The sendings would not have laid out the bells and the Book of the Dead for me if I was not, after all.”

Bran was grinning, and Father looked pleasantly surprised, but everyone else seemed stunned.

 _“You,_ Abhorsen-in-Waiting?” Arya spluttered. “But _you-“_

“Have as much Abhorsen blood as you, Arya,” Mother said sternly. She seemed surprised, but she rose from her seat and moved to embrace Sansa. “I cannot say that I am unsurprised, but the sendings always know – congratulations, sweetling.”

“You _cannot_ believe that Sansa is the true Abhorsen-in-Waiting!” Arya exclaimed, clearly horrified. “She- what does she know of _anything?!”_

“Arya,” Mother said, tone sharp and eyes hard. “Enough.”

“What do you think I spent three months in the Clayr’s Library doing, Arya?” Sansa asked. “Reading fairytales? I was _studying_ there – studying _magic.”_

“But you hate riding and swordplay and-“

“Has it ever occurred to you, Arya, that I don’t hate riding so much as riding with you?” Sansa spat. “If things were different, would you like it if I were constantly belittling you for having no interest in dressing nicely or behaving properly-“

“Now you’re being stupid, the Abhorsen can’t wear skirts-“

 _“Enough,”_ Mother said in a voice that would cut through steel. “Both of you are embarrassing yourselves – Arya, whether you like it or not, Sansa is Abhorsen-in-Waiting now, and that will not change.” She turned to Sansa then, and there was disappointment in her eyes. “This was not an auspicious start to your tenure as my apprentice, Sansa.”

“My apologies, Mother,” Sansa gritted out, wondering why it was that she was being reprimanded while Arya was being appeased. “May I be excused? I seem to have lost my appetite.”

“Now, Sansa-“

“Excuse me.”

She strode away, stiff-shouldered and her hands fisted tightly at her sides. She had to clamp her jaw shut to keep from screaming – how was it Arya managed to ruin _everything?!_ Just because she was unhappy with Sansa having been made Abhorsen-in-Waiting…

 

* * *

 

“So there is a new Abhorsen-in-Waiting,” Tywin said. “And we have no idea how she will behave? She _lived_ here for three months.”

“She lived in the Library for three months,” Cersei sniffed, twirling the silver and ivory wand of the Voice of the Nine Day Watch in one hand and lifting her cup of wine with the other. “Ask the Imp.”

“Tyrion says she’s a quiet girl,” Jaime offered from the far side of the room. “More interested in magic and history than politics.”

“Not her mother’s daughter, then,” Tywin said. “What else did he say?”

Jaime shrugged. “Pleasant enough, if a bit unsure of herself. He was not her guide, so he didn’t spend _that_ much time with her.”

“Who was her guide?”

“Willas – the crippled one, the one who works in the Library with Tyrion.”

“Olenna’s grandson,” Tywin gritted out – it was the worst kept secret in the Glacier that Tywin and Olenna, one of the oldest among the Clayr, who spent most of her time in a Dreaming Room because her Sight was so active, so fractured, but who still controlled her branch of the family with an iron fist, hated one another. “Tyrion assigned _him_ to the Abhorsen’s daughter?”

“The Librarians don’t partake in politics if they can help it,” Jaime said. “The Old Man would never allow them to – he’d take their heads with Binder if he thought they were playing games, especially with someone like the Abhorsen’s daughter. Besides, the crippled chap is old Leyton’s grandson, Tyrion probably had nothing to do with choosing him as the girl’s guide.”

“An Abhorsen, a Wallmaker and a reluctant Princess,” Cersei said thoughtfully. “Quite the brood Abhorsen Catelyn has raised.”

 

* * *

 

Arya was still not speaking to Sansa a week after Robb’s Farewell, and while that had not been a problem while their extended family was still at the House, now there was only the two of them, Mother and Rickon, and it was awkward.

Even more so when Mother called them into her study.

“I have had a letter from the King,” she said, unfolding a great sheaf of paper. “Condolences for Robb’s death, congratulations to Sansa on her appointment as Abhorsen-in-Waiting, and something very interesting indeed.”

“What’s that?” Arya asked, flinging herself down into the chair opposite Mother’s and leaving Sansa with no option but to stand.

Mother cleared her throat and began to read.

_“As I am sure you know, I have long been working with certain of the Clayr to discern the nature of whatever it is that is pushing the Northern tribesmen south. We are certain that, whatever it is, it is magical in origin, and in studying certain old texts I have come to a conclusion – a saviour of sorts is needed, someone literally born to fight whatever this creature or being might be.”_

“I thought the Northerners were coming south because their fertile land has been freezing over?” Sansa said, confused. So she had been taught, anyways, and it had been Mother and Father who had guided those lessons.

Mother merely grimaced before continuing.

_“It is my belief that the Charter has presented us with the perfect opportunity to create this saviour within one generation – the marriage of my son, Aegon, to one of your daughters would combine all four of the Bloodlines, and I would like to see the match made by the Midwinter’s Festival.”_

Sansa blinked in amazement – the notion of combining all four Bloodlines was ludicrous, nobody truly manifested the gifts of any more than one bloodline, not purely – and then laughed.

“Surely he cannot be serious?” she asked, genuinely stunned. “The children of such a match will still be children, no more or no less – they will not be some prophesied heroes!”

“This is an _order_ from the King,” Mother said tiredly. “But there is more.”

“What more could there be?”

_“I have one condition for you to bear in mind when choosing which of your daughters is to wed my son – there has not been an Abhorsen Queen since Sabriel, and I would keep it that way. Whichever of your daughters is to be Queen, she cannot also be Abhorsen-in-Waiting.”_

“What a pity that you must give up the bells so soon, Sansa,” Arya sighed mockingly. “While it is a wrench, I suppose-“

“Sansa is not giving up her bells,” Mother said. “She is not marrying Prince Aegon.”

Arya froze, half out of the chair, and turned to Mother in shock.

“You cannot expect _me_ to marry him!”

“I can, and I do,” Mother said. “The King has ordered one of you to marry the prince, and Sansa is Abhorsen-in-Waiting-“

 _“She was never meant to be Abhorsen-in-Waiting!”_ Arya shrieked. “She-“

“Is the Abhorsen-in-Waiting, and throwing a tantrum will not change that.”

All three of them turned to the door, startled by the sudden appearance of the little white cat with the violently green eyes.

“Mogget,” Mother said, eyeing the cat suspiciously. “We were not expecting you.”

Mogget’s smile was too human for his feline face, but then, he wasn’t really a cat at all – Sansa had studied what little was known of Mogget and still knew only that he was an immensely powerful Free Magic creature from the Beginning, and that while there had been more lore on him it had mysteriously disappeared. Once, he had been bound to the service of the Abhorsens, caught under Saraneth’s spell and then Ranna’s, but now he was free to come and go as he chose – he tended to come to the House when there was a fishing party, but otherwise he roamed as he pleased.

“Oh, I had to come and greet the new Abhorsen-in-Waiting,” he purred, leaping up onto the desk at Sansa’s hand. “She’s much better suited than the last one, you know.”

Mother’s mouth tightened into a thin line.

“Why are you here, Mogget?”

“The King is a fool for thinking that combining all four Bloodlines will create a saviour,” he said shortly, licking one dainty paw with his sharp pink tongue. “But he is the King, which makes him a dangerous fool – one of you must go to Belisaere and wed the prince, of that there can be no doubt.”

“But-“

“I was not finished speaking,” he said, cutting off all of their protests. “I do not doubt that he thinks this marriage will bring forth a child with the royal… whatever it is that makes them so very good at ruling, the Clayr’s Sight, the Abhorsen’s dominion over Death and the Wallmaker’s talent for creation and building. He is that sort of fool.”

“The child will be a child,” Sansa said. “Just a child, surely? It is impossible for all four Bloodlines to be present in such a way-“

“The child will be heir to the throne,” Mogget said, shrugging bony shoulders and stretching. “But you must understand that it _was_ Seen that a hero would be born of the King’s parents’ line, and clearly it is not _him.”_

“That still doesn’t explain why _I_ have to marry the prince instead of Sansa,” Arya huffed.

“It is as your mother said,” Mogget said peevishly. He and Arya had never gotten on – he’d always been fondest of Bran of all of them. Sansa had sometimes seen the little cat-thing looking at her brother almost wistfully, as if Bran reminded him of someone long gone. “She is Abhorsen-in-Waiting. You are not, and never would have been unless the entirety of the Abhorsen’s bloodline was erased aside from yourself and your mother.”

“Bran-“

“Well, aside from the Wallmaker, of course,” Mogget agreed, rolling his eyes. “He is hardly Abhorsen at all, for all he has your mother’s hair.”

“I am not suited-“

“You will have to _become_ suited to such a life,” Mother said sharply. “We cannot defy the King, Arya – for all that he needs us, Abhorsens and Wallmakers alike, we need him, too. Besides, it is not as though you are to be Queen – Princess Rhaenys is her father’s heir, is she not?”

“The King said in the letter that there has not been an Abhorsen _Queen_ in a very long time,” Arya said. “Why would he say such a thing if Prince Aegon is not to take the throne in his place?”

“Arya-“

“I am not suited to being Queen,” Arya said angrily, and suddenly she had a lapful of white fur.

“For the sake of your family,” Mogget said sweetly, his fur seeming to crackle and spark as his claws, longer and sharper than those of any other cat Sansa had ever known, dug into Arya’s thighs, “you will _make yourself_ suited to being Queen. King Rhaegar is a decent King – I have seen many much worse – but he is not a forgiving man when his eccentricities are not indulged.”

“Mother-“

“Mogget has the right of it,” Mother admitted. “You will go to Belisaere and you will marry the prince. We do not have a choice.”

“What is this threat the King speaks of? Something coming from the North? It must be something indeed to send the Northerners running south,” Sansa put in, worried more about that than Arya’s fate in Belisaere – she had heard plenty of talk about the royal family while she was with the Clayr from the Queen’s brother, Oberyn, a Paperwing pilot who spent as much time in the Library as in the air, and while she knew that as their uncle he was biased, he had had nothing but praise for Princess Rhaenys and Prince Aegon. This threat to the Northerners…

The lands beyond the Clayr’s Glacier to the north were wild and inhospitable, and the people who lived there were tough and rough and, above all, fearless. Touchstone I, first king after the Interregnum, had been the bastard son of the last Queen and her Northern lover, and his berserker blood had been passed down through the royal line in varying concentrations – it was said that the current King’s father had had too much of it, had been mad with it. It ran in the Wallmakers, too, because Prince Sameth had been the first Wallmaker and King Touchstone his father.

“Old magic,” Mogget said, something soft in his voice. “Those lands were beyond the Charter even at the Beginning – the mountains where the Clayr made their home formed a natural barrier.”

“So Free Magic, then? A sorcerer?”

“Not Free Magic as you know it,” Mogget said, shaking his head. “Something more… Elemental. But just as hungry for life as the Dead, if my guess is right.”

Sansa had never heard of Mogget’s guesses being wrong. She shuddered.

 

* * *

 

Mother was _not_ happy when she learned that Sansa had read the Book of the Dead twice, once before she was Abhorsen-in-Waiting.

“Robb was away with you, and he left it behind him,” Sansa argued. “No harm came to me, so what is the problem?”

“The problem is harm _could_ have come to you!” Mother shouted. “Sansa, that book is no plaything, any more than the bells are! It could have killed you, you know that!”

“Well, it didn’t,” Sansa said with a shrug. “And it won’t – not unless I turn away from the Charter and my mark becomes corrupted, which I won’t.”

Studying with Mother was difficult for Sansa, in some ways, because her time in the Great Library had left her used to guiding her own learning, and Mother kept a tight rein on what Sansa could and couldn’t read. She remembered wistfully the bracelet of emeralds all the Librarians wore, bracelets that acted as keys – the higher your rank within the Library, the more emeralds and, eventually, rubies were lit by the Charter spells they held and, therefore, the more doors you could open – sometimes when Mother forbade her from looking up this bestiary or that grimoire. She had been forbidden very little in the Great Library, and she longed for that freedom.

 

* * *

 

It was four weeks – a full month – after Robb’s Farewell before Mother decided Sansa was ready to come with her to work, to fight something Dead or Free Magic, as was the Abhorsen’s duty.

Sansa nearly threw up twice before climbing into the Paperwing behind her mother, and her bells felt crushingly heavy against her chest as she gathered up enough breath to sing down the wind they needed while Mother whistled to the Paperwing.

“It is a Mordicant,” Mother called back over her shoulder as they flew west. “That’s my guess.”

Sansa bit back a murmur of fear. Mordicants were Greater Dead creatures, sentient to a degree, big and strong and fast and clever – and, worst of all, they could travel back and forth between Life and Death, and seemed to have an uncanny knack of finding the right place to emerge from Death to find a specific location in Life.

Or perhaps the worst of them was that because their bodies were moulded from bog clay and human blood, because the body had to be infused with Free Magic before it could host the Dead spirit within, it meant that there was a necromancer about, too, one that had not yet been reported.

Sansa knew that this was what she was meant to do with her life, but she thought it only normal that the idea of facing her first necromancer frightened her.

Still, it _did_ sound like a Mordicant – people had been going missing, and there had been seemingly random fires, usually somewhere near where the missing person had last been seen. Mordicants practically dripped flames in their wake, after all.

“Remember,” Mother said as they climbed down from the Paperwing – the journey that would have taken them four days ahorse had taken them just six hours by air – and strapped on bells and swords. Mother had the Abhorsen’s sword, of course, with the green stone in the pommel, but Sansa was carrying the Abhorsen-in-Waiting’s sword, Nehima, inscribed simply with _Remember Nehima_ on the blade (nobody seemed to know who or what Nehima had been, of course, but the sword had been in the family for generations). “Let me take the lead-“

“I know, Mother,” Sansa promised. “Abhorsen, I mean.”

“Come along then, Abhorsen-in-Waiting,” Mother said, starting for the biggest house in the village, where the local leader would live, boots squelching softly in the mud. “Let us go about our business, hmm?”

The people of the village – one of the countless nameless villages that were spotted across the plains above the Long Cliffs – were anxious, and the spokesman insisted on testing both Sansa’s and Mother’s Charter marks, even though _everyone_ knew what the Abhorsen’s colours were, _everyone_ knew no necromancer would ever wear the silver keys. Still, when tensions were high people had a tendency to fear the bells, an instrument of evil in any hands but an Abhorsen’s, so Sansa stood and accepted the testing without complaint. It did not do to cause discord among people who were already half-frantic with fright, who she and Mother _needed_ if they were to do their work.

 

* * *

 

“Elia says it’s the younger of the Abhorsen’s girls that Aegon’s to marry, not the one you fancy,” Oberyn said, sliding down the ladder with three heavy books tucked under his arm. “The Abhorsen-in-Waiting is still free, and has been Seen to wed one of us. Who knows, it might even be you.”

Willas harrumphed, trying to ignore the blush burning under his beard, and took the books from Oberyn.

“The Abhorsen-in-Waiting has more important things to worry about than a _potential_ future,” he said, motioning for Oberyn to follow him as he turned back up the spiral. “Fighting Dead things, for example, and learning her trade from her mother.”

“She’s also just barely twenty-one,” Oberyn pointed out, “and by all reports she’s never had a chance for… Romantic adventure.”

“Oh yes, a crippled Clayr librarian over ten years her senior is _precisely_ the sort of romantic adventure she needs,” Willas laughed, rolling his eyes. “You are a cad, Oberyn.”

“And you’re a fool, Willas,” Tyrion called as Willas and Oberyn rounded the bend and entered the main Reading Room. “You’re only nine years older than Sansa.”

“Still teasing poor Willas about the lovely Abhorsen-in-Waiting, little brother?”

All three turned to see Jaime coming towards them, ivory-and-steel wand in hand, little pouch of ivory tokens hanging from his belt.

“Jaime,” Tyrion said, raising an eyebrow. “The Voice of the Nine Day Watch is all Clayr and none – can you and _her_ even have a little brother?”

Jaime rolled his eyes and passed a token down to Tyrion.

“You’ve been Seen in the Observatory,” he said. “As have both of you,” he added, passing tokens to Willas and Oberyn, frowning just slightly. “The Watch is being expanded.”

“Still no luck in Seeing to the north?” Oberyn asked, surprised. “I had heard…?”

“No,” Jaime said grimly. “And with Prince Aegon’s looming marriage, the King grows impatient with us – he seems to believe that the fault lies with us personally rather than with the Sight.”

Willas sniffed derisively, and knew that the other three agreed – what did an UnSighted know of the Sight? Charter, Willas had Awakened when he was eleven, nearly twenty years ago, and he still didn’t truly understand the Sight.

“Come, then,” Oberyn said, still frowning. “We’d better change – I doubt the rest of the Watch would appreciate us turning up in waistcoats or flying gear, what do you think?”

 

* * *

 

The Mordicant was a lot bloody bigger than the Book of the Dead had led Sansa to believe it would be, and the necromancer was a lot more brazen than Mother had thought she would be.

Sansa hadn’t even heard what the necromancer was calling herself, because she and Mother had barely crossed the stream that guarded the village on its western fringe but the Mordicant had been on them, and then the necromancer had appeared so of course Mother had turned to deal with her.

Leaving Sansa with an enormous beast of bog clay and shadow and flame and hatred, a beast that’s attacking her so quickly she can only just keep Nehima between herself and its fiery claws-

In a moment’s respite, she manages to loose a bell, not knowing which it is until she pulls it from her bandoleer and her fingers wrap properly around the mahogany handle – and it’s not Saraneth, damn it, it’s Kibeth, but she doesn’t have time to worry about not being able to bind the Mordicant so for now she swings Kibeth in a sharp, repetitive loop, keeping her left hand low at her hip as Nehima’s blade sparked Charter-gold and sank into the Mordicant’s swiping arm, and-

It would have been comical, seeing the huge creature jerk and spasm as it fought against Kibeth’s jolly, furious chime, seeing the great feet dance awkwardly ever closer to the stream. Sansa’s own foot tapped in time to the music of the Walker, a bell she’d been warned to be wary of, and she swung Kibeth out into a loose figure-of-eight in front of herself, the music shifting and changing.

The Mordicant staggered arhythmically towards the stream, and Sansa sheathed Nehima (she’d have to scrub the blade later, it was filthy) and used her free hand to draw Saraneth, the Binder, the strongest bell save one.

Swinging both bells together, forcing her will into the ringing, forcing the Mordicant to Walk and Binding it back into Death, she drove it back towards the stream, further and further and-

It disappeared into Death, a flash of darkness, and Sansa huffed angrily and immediately reached out for that cold pull that was never far away, reached out for the river that never stopped flowing, sheathing Kibeth and switching Saraneth to her left hand before drawing Nehima once more even as ice gathered on her eyelashes and the world shifted around her.

The Mordicant was waiting for her right on the border between Life and Death, larger even here than it was in Life, the flames that swam greasily across its flesh darker and hotter, the metallic stench of Free Magic that had been drowned by forest and stream in Life overwhelming now in the flat greyness of Death.

Sansa didn’t dare scream – to scream was to risk discordance with Saraneth’s knell as she lifted the bell high over her head and rang it in a simple circle, somehow managing not to lose her rhythm as the Mordicant rushed her, as she forced Nehima up just in time and ducked to avoid having her head taken clean from her shoulders – her body may still have been in Life, but a wound in Death was as lethal if not more so than a wound taken in Life.

The beast screeched as Saraneth wound its bonds around it, as Sansa bent it to her will through the bell. It fought harder than before, but its movements were sluggish, its fires dimmer, and Sansa could _feel_ her triumph coming.

“Go now,” she said, and she barely recognised her own voice – she sounded like Mother, like Uncle Brynden, like every other Abhorsen before her had sounded while taking control of _their_ domain. “Go beyond the Ninth Gate. Do not tarry. Do not falter. Do not stop.”

The Mordicant was cowering now, a lump of darkness in the grey water of the river, so Sansa dared sheath Nehima in order to draw Kibeth once more. Binder and Walker sang together, a rapid quickstep that the Mordicant had no choice but to obey, and Sansa kept ringing her bells until the First Gate roared in the distance and she sensed that she was as much alone as possible in Death.

She sheathed her bells with a deep breath, looking about herself for a moment. The grey river of Death stretched as far as she could see in all directions, which wasn’t really all that far, considering the strange haze that distorted her vision after twenty yards or so. She could hear the roar of the First Gate, a waterfall, in the distance.

Death was split into nine Precints, each with their own perils. Sansa had never been further than the Third Precinct, but she knew well that she may someday have to go much deeper into Death to fight some of the Greater Dead. Mother had said-

“Mother!” she exclaimed, feeling for the border with Life and leaping back into the dull afternoon, ice and frost falling from her hands and bandoleer and sword and braid, because she had to move, but-

Mother had the tip of the Abhorsen’s sword pressed to the throat of the necromancer who seemed no older than Sansa, whose Charter mark was only very slightly corrupted. Sansa wondered if that meant the woman could be saved, that she could be returned to the Charter, but Mother’s face was cold, her eyes complete without mercy.

“I name you Muriel,” Mother said, and Sansa noticed Saraneth in her hand for the first time, Mother’s hand inside the mouth of the bell to still the clapper. Even as Sansa watched, though, Mother tossed the bell into the air and caught the handle, swinging into an easy back-and-forth motion without pause. “You will lay down your bells and never wield them again. You will forsake Free Magic. You will go to Belisaere and seek a new Baptism in the Charter on the Great Charter Stones. You will not tarry in this duty.”

Saraneth told, and Muriel wailed, struggling against the bell and Mother’s indomitable will alike, but it was futile. Mother had been Abhorsen for fifteen years, since Uncle Brynden died, and Abhorsen-in-Waiting for many long years before that – this necromancer, this Muriel, was still wet behind the ears.

She stood, stripped off her bells, and then she waited, trembling and her jaw set in absolute fury, as Mother calmly tidied away bell and sword and tucked her hair back behind her ear.

“The Mordicant?” she asked Sansa, smiling tiredly.

“Gone beyond the Ninth Gate,” Sansa assured her. “What do we do with…?”

“Kill me,” Muriel gritted out. “I will not bend to the Charter again-“

“You will _bend,_ as you put it,” Mother said firmly, “or the King will execute you. He is not so kind as I am.”

Sansa remembered the stories of what the King had done to the man Aunt Lya had been promised to before Jon was born, a nobleman from the lands just south of Belisaere who had been a great friend of Father’s. He had objected to the King taking Lyanna as his lover, which Sansa thought was fair enough, and the King had simply executed him.

No, the King was not reputed to be a kind man, or even a merciful one. He was terrifyingly, implacably just.

Muriel seemed aware of this, because her eyes went wide and her mouth opened into a perfect “o” of horror.

“Please,” she begged. “Kill me now. They say he tortures-“

“You should have considered that before you turned away from the Charter,” Mother said. “Come, we will walk back to the village, and from there we will escort you to the nearest Guardpost.”

Sansa made sure all of her own bells were secure and safe before stepping forward to pick up Muriel’s – the necromancers stank of Free Magic, metallic and hot and sour, and there was an uncomfortable heat emanating even from the leather of the bandoleer when Sansa lifted it. Perversions of Charter marks swam across the blackened wood of the handles, and Sansa had no wish to ever look upon the bare silver of the bells.

“What will we do with these?” she asked, holding them gingerly.

“Bring them to the Tower,” Mother said. “Your uncle Brandon has a gift for unmaking such things – he will cleanse them of the Free Magic and reforge the silver into something useful. Something non-magical, just to be safe.”

Muriel made another horrible noise, something like a wail, and Sansa flinched because it felt as though heat throbbed through Muriel’s bells at the sound.

Mother drew Dyrim, rang it once, sharply, and Muriel’s voice choked to a gargle in her throat.

“You have been branded with a dangerous mark,” Mother said firmly, replacing Dyrim and gesturing to Muriel’s ruined Charter mark, glowing sickly red-gold on her forehead. “That which lies far north beyond the Clayr’s Glacier abhors life. It would have done you no good to serve it.”

Muriel’s face twisted with anger again, and she sprang forward – but Mother was ready, a Charter spell already in her hand that she flung out, a net of soft golden marks that expanded and bound Muriel.

“The Others come,” Mother said, and there was a despair in her voice that shocked Sansa. “They come, and they must be turned back, but fools like you make that difficult.”

 

* * *

 

Sansa had ample opportunity to ponder what these “Others” Mother had mentioned might be, because she was left to fortify the village against future attacks while Mother flew Muriel to the nearest Guardpost in the Paperwing.

She became aware, as she sang her next round of marks of protection into the low stone wall that bordered the northern edge of the village, clearing her throat before reaching for the near-painfully high note of the master mark, that she was being watched. She sang the note, sealed the mark into the stone (she’d always found it easiest to work magic by singing it, something that had always annoyed Arya to no end), and then she turned to her audience.

It was three young men, her own age or a little older, and two women of the same age, all dark and lithe and striking. Sansa knew that the Plains above the Long Cliffs had been given to the Southerlings – two hundred years could not erase the memory of the only mass immigration in the history of the Old Kingdom – which explained why she stuck out sorely among the villagers.

“May I help you?”

“We were told the Abhorsen-in-Waiting was a man,” said the tallest of the men, folding his arms and eyeing her bandoleer suspiciously. “The Abhorsen’s son.”

“He was,” Sansa said shortly. “And he died. He was my brother. I am Abhorsen-in-Waiting now – is that a problem?”

The two women looked at one another briefly before shaking their heads.

“No, ma’am,” the one with her hair pinned back said. “We meant no offence-“

“I will be finished soon,” Sansa said. “I can speak with you then, if you would not mind?”

They hesitated – the three men obviously _did_ have a problem with her as Abhorsen-in-Waiting – but they left, and Sansa moved on to the copse of trees to the east of the village. She had more singing to do, but it was hard to line up the Charter marks for the spells in her head when all she could think of was Robb.

Robb was honourable and brave and strong, and he was dead before his time because he thought he was the Abhorsen-in-Waiting

Sansa hoped that her fears would prove untrue, but she knew now – _I will bear his shadow all my life_ she thought as she pressed her hand to the trunk of the stoutest tree she could find, burning the marks into place under her palm. _I will never be fully accepted as Abhorsen-in-Waiting because people except a man, expect Robb, expect another Uncle Brynden. They don’t want me, because I don’t seem strong like Mother – I sing my magic, and I wear my tunic too long, and my hair is too long too, and I like to be clean and neat and…_

 _And that’s Arya talking,_ she told herself sternly, singing the marks for protection into the outermost trees, nearest the village. _I am the one for this job. The sendings would not have left out the bells for me if I wasn’t. The Book of the Dead would have killed me. Mogget would not have given me his blessing._

Sansa paused and touched her fingers to the crest on the breast of her surcoat – the same silver keys on deep blue field that she had worn all her life. Robb, Arya and Rickon had all always worn silver Abhorsen’s keys quartered with the gold Wallmaker’s trowel, and Bran had always worn golden trowel on yellow field, as Wallmaker as Father.

But Sansa’s keys had never been quartered. Never once had the sendings laid anything out for her in Wallmaker yellow, with a pattern of trowels. She wore blue, she wore navy, she wore black, she wore keys.

It annoyed her more than she would ever care to admit that Mother and the rest of them (except Bran and Aunt Lyanna, and maybe Uncle Edmure, because he never seemed to build up perceptions of anyone until they did something impressive in some way) had completely ignored that, had discounted her entirely from the family in all the ways that mattered – they had always thought her useless for anything save… Well, useless things.

Sansa knew Mother didn’t think that of her anymore – if she had before, today would certainly have negated _that_ opinion – but she knew that she could save the world from some ancient evil and Arya would probably still resent her for being Abhorsen-in-Waiting, for being, as Arya saw it, the cause of her having to marry Prince Aegon.

Sansa sighed, straightened up, and sighed again. She was tired – she’d twisted her wrist badly while fighting the Mordicant, and hadn’t the energy to use a little magic to soothe the pain – and she longed for nothing more than home and a bath, or maybe a chance to curl up in a big chair with a big book and a cup of tea.

She sniffed, wrinkled her nose, and shook her head.

Maybe a bath, and then a book and tea.

First, though, she had to wait for Mother to return with the Paperwing, which meant waiting in the village. Which meant facing those who felt that a male Abhorsen-in-Waiting might be better.

 

* * *

 

“You honestly expect all four of the bloodlines to manifest in Aegon’s children by the Abhorsen’s daughter?”

Rhaegar nodded absently, and Elia sighed. She had told him of what she had Seen – not the girl with the red Abhorsen hair, as Rhaegar expected, but the girl who looked just like Lyanna, the Wallmaker who had borne Rhaegar’s bastard, a girl with grey eyes and untidy dark hair and a pouty, frowny, petulant mouth. She’d been dressed in rich Abhorsen blue edged with Wallmaker gold, and Aegon had seemed as unhappy as she was, although he’d placed the circlet of twisted gold on her head without complaint.

But Rhaegar was convinced that the Abhorsen would send her eldest girl, the one Oberyn had written of, who had visited the Glacier, who was supposed to be something of a beauty, like her mother. Elia liked the Abhorsen, found the quietly confident and frighteningly competent woman to be good company and excellent at her job, and if the Abhorsen thought that her eldest daughter was best suited to be Abhorsen-in-Waiting, well, Elia trusted her judgement.

Rhaegar had no place interfering in Abhorsen and Wallmaker and Clayr business. He seemed to think that any child of Aegon’s and- what was the girl’s name? Oh, Arya, that was it – any child of Aegon’s and Arya’s would have the strongest Sight of any Clayr, would be ideal Abhorsen-in-Waiting, would be the finest Wallmaker since Prince Sameth himself, would be an excellent king or queen.

Elia had asked Oberyn and Doran to watch for any children, and they had agreed – no new princes or princesses had yet been Seen, and that only made Elia worry more that Rhaegar’s plans were complete and utter folly.

Daenerys poked her head around the door, glanced at Rhaegar, rolled her eyes, and slipped back out. Elia almost laughed at her sister-in-law’s antics, but she understood Dany’s frustrations well – the princess was supposed to be marrying in just a few weeks, but Rhaegar had hardly paid a moment’s attention to his sister or her intended since sending that letter to the Abhorsen’s House.

He hadn’t paid a moment’s attention to _anything_ since sending that Charter-damned letter to the Abhorsen’s House.

 

* * *

 

Mother healed Sansa’s wrist – which had swollen up nicely purple by the time she returned – as soon as they’d said their farewells to the villagers.

Sansa had decided against telling Mother about the strange looks she’d gotten, the questions about Robb, the implication that Sansa couldn’t possibly be as competent as her brother had been. Mother would just get angry, and Sansa was too tired for that.

The fight in Death, using the bells – that had tired her more than the Charter magic she’d cast to ward the village against Dead. Forcing her will into the ringing of the bells had been much harder than she’d anticipated, and the balance between Free and Charter magics in them was so much more precarious than she could ever have imagined.

“Are you hungry?” Mother asked as Sansa clambered up into the passenger seat at the back of the Paperwing, Nehima and bells tucked safely at her side.

“I ate already,” Sansa said, shaking her head. “Mother, what you said to that necromancer – the Others? What are they?”

Mother’s mouth went small, and she sighed.

“Not here,” she said. “Back at the House, where it’s safe.”

She stowed her sword and bells and climbed up, and then they whistled and sang the Paperwing into the air and started their journey home.


	2. The Abhorsen-in-Waiting

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'M SO FUCKING SORRY THIS TOOK YEARS PLEASE FORGIVE ME AND ENJOY

“The Mordicant wasn’t as strong as it should have been,” Mother said as they flew above the wind, only a whisper of noise below them. “And that necromancer… They were a test.”

“From who?”

“ _For_ who is more important,” Mother called back before whistling to the Paperwing. The Long Cliffs were far behind them now, and the Wall was a low line to the south. “For you – someone or something wished to test the strength of our new Abhorsen-in-Waiting. I don’t understand why they sent someone so weak, but…”

Sansa slumped back, dejected to realise now that Mother’s praise before the villagers had only been half-true – if the Mordicant really had been _weak,_ then it was no great achievement on Sansa’s part to have banished it, was it?

“And a necromancer who made no effort to wield Mosrael, who made no effort to venture into Death, which should have given her an advantage? She was barely a necromancer at all.”

“Perhaps she understood that your relative experience in Death would give _you_ the advantage,” Sansa suggested, adjusting her goggles and squinting against the brilliant sunshine visible across the Wall in Ancelstierre – she’d always loved coming to visit the Wallmaker’s Tower, if only just to see that. Time ran at different rates on either side of the Wall, and while it was dusk here in the Old Kingdom, and dull besides, it was a beautiful afternoon in Ancelstierre. Sansa had never really understood _why_ there was a difference between the two countries – Bran had tried to explain it to her once, but she’d quickly lost the run of his explanation – but there was, and that was enough to be getting along with.

“No, a necromancer without an alignment to the Charter is always more powerful in Death,” Mother disagreed. “The Charter is damped or deadened in Death, but Free Magic is at its strongest there – she didn’t know what she was doing.”

The necromancer’s bells were hot and stinking by Sansa’s feet, as was her sword, which Mother had taken from her before handing her over to the Guards – it, too, had those perversions of Charter marks swimming across blade and hilt and scabbard, queer shapes that made Sansa’s eyes water if she looked for too long.

“I’ll rest easier when your uncle unmakes bells and blade,” Mother said, and she sounded so very tired that Sansa reached out to touch her shoulder in comfort without thinking, which earned her a quick over-the-shoulder smile. “I wish that I could have him unmake every set of bells and every ensorcelled blade, but sometimes I can’t get to them in time, or the sorcerers hide them too well.”

“Bran mentioned that he and Father were working on something to detect Free Magic artefacts,” Sansa said, adjusting her goggles again as the Paperwing dipped and the angle of the light from across the Wall shifted. “A device that you – well, that _we_ could carry.”

“Your father mentioned that to me, too,” Mother agreed, “but he said that it is still not near ready for use.”

“Maybe they can test it on these bells,” Sansa suggested. “Or the sword, if you fear the bells might be too dangerous yet.”

The Wallmaker’s Tower was less a tower and more a tiny, exquisitely beautiful citadel centred around the Charter stone atop Barhedrin Ridge. The forges and foundries were on the south-western corner – Uncle Brandon worked there, mostly, because he had a gift for metalworking, and because he was enormously strong and revelled in the physicality of smithing – and the thick black smoke, laced with the shimmering remnants of cast marks, was the only blemish on the otherwise lovely view spread out below them as Sansa and Mother whistled and sang the Paperwing down to land.

 

* * *

 

 

Father was waiting for them on the landing platform, and Mother jumped out to greet him – Sansa politely (and, perhaps, a touch squeamishly) turned away as Mother threw herself into Father’s arms and they kissed for longer than necessary, which left Sansa plenty of time to retrieve the necromancer’s bells and sword and to tug off her glove with her teeth, lay her hand on the Paperwing’s nose, and thank it for carrying them.

The loop of blue around the black pupil of the drawn-on eye seemed to spark for a moment, and Sansa smiled in recognition – there was so much magic used in creating the Paperwings that they were slightly sentient, enough so to aid their pilots and passengers in managing strange winds and things in the air. Sansa remembered Uncle Brandon complaining that the Paperwings could be a bad influence once, and how guilty Aunt Lya and Uncle Ben had looked at that – they’d reminded her of Arya and Bran in that moment, with Robb frowning disapprovingly at them for behaving badly.

“Come on then,” Mother called, waving her over. “Let’s get those blasted things to your uncle, shall we?”

 

* * *

 

Watching Brandon work was fascinating, Sansa had always thought so, even if she understood less than half the magic he used and knew nothing at all about smithing and building.

“The Free Magic must be purged,” he explained as he snapped his goggles into place. “Dangerous stuff, necromantic magic – the bells you and Cat use are bound by the Charter, but metal likes Free Magic no more than we do, which makes a necromancer’s tools twice as dangerous as their wielder.”

Sansa watched from a safe distance as he heated the forge with a casually-tossed bundle of marks, glowing almost aggressively golden when he brought the first of the bells – Ranna, always start with Ranna, that had been in the Book of the Dead, Sansa suddenly remembered (as was the way of the Book, knowledge only to be remembered when relevant), making and unmaking, start with Ranna – closer, it glowing with its own red-black light that seemed to fight back against the Charter-glow.

“I’ve half a mind to ask your mother for the lend of the Book of the Dead,” Brandon called absentmindedly as he plunged the bell, handle and all, into the golden fire. “Find out more about forging the bells to make it easier to unmake them-“

“The Book of the Dead-“

“Is too dangerous,” he agreed, grinning over his shoulder at her. “I’ve had that talk from Cat more times than I can count, sweetheart, don’t worry.”

Sansa watched in silence as Brandon worked easily through the first five bells, and then she watched with more interest when he hesitated over Saraneth.

“Always the worst on these two,” he said grimly. “Shout for Bran, will you? I’ll need him for Astarael if not for Saraneth.”

Sansa slipped off the bench and darted to the door, only to be greeted by Lyanna and Bran, already half-dressed in treated leather with their goggles hanging around their necks.

“You go on, pet,” Lyanna said brightly, patting Sansa’s arm. “This could get untidy, and we wouldn’t want you getting tied up in all this – Father has something for you, besides. Go on, go find him – he had Ben make it especially.”

“If you’re sure there’s nothing I can do here to help-“

“No, no,” Bran assured her, winking through the bright blue-tinted lenses of his goggles (Sansa and Robb had given them to him for his last birthday, the glass tinted blue like the Abhorsen’s rather than yellow like a Wallmaker’s). “We’ve got it – go on, Ben’s looking for you. He’s in the Armoury.”

Sansa rolled her eyes and ruffled Bran’s hair – she wondered when she’d had to start reaching up to do so – and kissed Lya on the cheek.

“Shout if you need anything,” she told them, and Brandon laughed.

“If we shout, you’ll need your own bells,” he called out to her as Bran pulled the door shut.

Sansa rolled her eyes and turned for the Armoury, to where she knew (or hoped, because Bran and Aunt Lya had a tendency to be absentminded about things like people and timekeeping and could very well have gotten the message wrong) Uncle Ben was waiting for her with some mysterious gift from Granddad – which meant Granddad was having a serious talk with Mother and Father about something, probably about this device of Father’s for finding Free Magic artefacts.

The Armoury wasn’t far at all from Brandon’s forge, so Sansa took her time and stretched out her arms as she walked – it was rare for Uncle Ben to be at the Tower, because he spent much of his time in Belisaere as a captain of the Royal Guard, and Sansa was looking forward to seeing him. Of everyone in the family, he was the most like Father except maybe Jon.

The doors were open when she arrived, and Uncle Ben was talking to someone – Sansa didn’t recognise the woman, but she was wearing the same red surcoat of the Royal Guard as he was, so she assumed that the woman – Dacey, he was calling her – was a companion of his.

“Ah, Sansa!” he called, waving her over. “Come here a minute.”

She slipped carefully around the massed ranks of weapons, all of them swimming with golden Charter marks, some with inscriptions that shimmered in and out of view as she neared and went, some that almost seemed to hum when Nehima neared them.

Uncle Ben laughed at something his friend said while he was bent over a chest, and Sansa smiled in greeting – the woman was far taller than Sansa herself, but she winked cheerfully in reply when Sansa came near enough.

“Here we are,” he said, after Sansa had stood smiling awkwardly at Dacey for just a moment shy of too long. “Your granddad left this for you – said it’d suit you better than the one Robb wore.”

It was a sword belt and scabbard, made to fit Nehima and a thousand times more beautiful than the ones Sansa was currently wearing – the tooled leather was more elaborate than any she’d ever seen before, patterns and keys up and down the scabbard and-

“Oh, it’s so lovely,” she sighed, running her fingers over the engraved silvered steel of the buckle, the keys with tiny chips of sapphire in their eyes warm with Charter spells for endurance and protection. “But Granddad didn’t _leave_ this for me – it’s brand new!”

Ben grinned. “He couldn’t have his pretty girl using that battered old thing of Robb’s, could he?”

Sansa drew Nehima and passed it across to him, suddenly not caring at all that her shoulders were aching and she smelled absolutely vile and her hair was stuck to her head with sweat and grime, because this was the first true validation of her position as Abhorsen-in-Waiting save for Bran addressing her formally the morning the sendings left the bells for her from within the family since she’d inherited the position, and she loved Uncle Ben and Granddad more than she could possibly express for it.

It looked _infinitely_ finer than Robb’s old sword belt had (there hadn’t been another scabbard in the House that fit Nehima), and Sansa couldn’t help but turn this way and that to admire it, biting her lip in sheer unadulterated pleasure.

“Oh, _thank_ you, Uncle Ben!” she crowed, throwing her arms around him as soon as she’d safely sheathed Nehima once more (he smelled near as bad as she did, so she supposed he probably hadn’t been here long either). “I’d best find Granddad-“

“Observatory,” Ben called after her as she sprinted for the door. “Ned and Cat are with him, so mind how you go – and send Jon to me if you see him, Sansa!”

 

* * *

 

Daenerys frowned at her wedding gown.

“I do wish I could wear something other than red,” she huffed. “And Rhaegar must stop insisting on quite so much gold embroidery, it’s horrible.”

Elia laughed, shaking her head, and Rhaenys rolled her eyes.

“You know how Dad is,” she sighed, straightening her own heavily-embroidered gown. “He thinks people will forget who we are if we don’t cover everything in golden towers and wear nothing but red. At least Viserys will be back for it, I suppose – he’ll hate it even more than we do.”

Dany frowned again, smoothing her hands down the heavy silk skirts (it was far too hot for a dress like this, but Rhaegar had given the seamstresses instructions and nobody dared defy the King) as Elia and Rhaenys chatted behind her, wondering what Jorah would think of this. As far as she knew, he had no patience for what Aegon had teasingly dubbed “frippery” – which suited Dany well enough. She had little enough patience beyond what was necessary (although she did like her hair to look nice).

“Do you think Rhaegar would notice if I altered it a little bit myself?” she asked. “Just a little, I promise.”

Elia arched one perfectly groomed eyebrow – Elia was always perfectly groomed, the perfect Queen except for those frightening moments when the Sight seized her at random – and smiled.

“Well, I won’t tell him,” she said, and Rhaenys giggled behind her hand.

“ _Mother,”_ she chided. “Dad would wish for Dany to be comfortable on her wedding day, surely?”

Dany turned away from her niece and sister-in-law and hummed, thinking that if she removed a layer or two of underskirts and cut away all that awful gold lace trim and unpicked some of the embroidery and resewed it herself, with less flourishes, then she might have a serviceable wedding dress. She intended on being able to _dance,_ after all, even if Jorah had blushingly admitted to being a terrible dancer – there were always her brothers and nephews, provided Rhaegar didn’t behave as a complete fool and cruelly exclude Jon, despite Dany’s express orders that her youngest nephew was to be invited (well, youngest nephew unless Viserys had a secret love-child tucked away somewhere from his adventures, but Dany very much doubted that).

“Come on, then,” she said bracingly, interrupting their chatter. “Jorah said his cousin will be returning from the Borderlands today or tomorrow – I should find out what foods she likes and have them made, what do you think?”

 

* * *

 

Sansa all but skipped across the wide courtyard and ducked under the cloister with a twirl, overjoyed by Granddad’s gift and the prospect of a bath (Granddad always brought in bubble baths and soaps from Ancelstierre for her and Arya, rose and vanilla and lavender and citrus, and because the water here wasn’t heated by hot springs as it was at the House or, as she’d discovered, the Clayr’s Glacier, there was no stench of sulphur to be overcome), and so it was that she quite literally stumbled upon Jon and a girl with green hair.

“Sansa!” he exclaimed, surging to his feet and sending the girl tumbling to the ground. “Oh, Charter, I’m sorry, Wylla, I didn’t-“

“No harm done,” the girl, Wylla, said. She looked about Sansa’s age, and all that bright green hair was a marvellous contrast with her vividly blue eyes. “This must be Robb’s sister, then?”

“Yes, yes, this is Sansa,” Jon said, looking mortified but trying his best to hide it. “Abhorsen-in-Waiting Sansa, actually – Sansa, this is Wylla. Her grandfather is the guardian of Holehallow.”

Sansa’s little bubble of happiness shrank a touch.

“Wynafryd’s sister?” she asked, and when Wylla nodded it was all Sansa could do not to flinch. Robb had been courting Wylla’s older sister as best his duties allowed, and-

“She wrote to your mother as soon as she returned from Ancelstierre and heard the news,” Wylla said. “She was delayed on business – we trade, as well as acting guardian for Holehallow – and was unable to return in time for your brother’s Farewell. She thought that it would be inappropriate to visit, given your… Particular habits after a death in the family.”

It was considered something like bad manners to express condolences upon an Abhorsen’s death – Sansa could vaguely remember how angry Mother had been when the King had sent a formal letter of condolence by messenger when Uncle Brynden died, when Sansa was only six. She was glad Wylla did not try to offer her comfort.

“Uncle Ben is looking for you, Jon,” she said. “It was lovely to meet you, Wylla – I expect I shall be seeing a great deal more of you?”

Jon and Wylla both blushed, and Sansa laughed as she spun off again, heading for the north-east corner, for the Observatory (how strange, she thought, that only the royal family was without an Observatory – the Nine Day Watch met in the Clayr’s Observatory, and few outside the family ever saw the Abhorsen’s, and the Wallmaker’s was…)

The enormous doors – bog oak, as hard and heavy as steel and deep, deep black – were closed when Sansa approached them, but she stood on tiptoe and pressed the trowel in the hand of the tiny man at the top of the lowest tall tower, and they swung open with a soft surge of Charter warmth.

Rickard, her grandfather, was a severe looking old man with a massive grey beard, those same grey eyes as Father and Arya and the rest, and while he was intimidating to most people, he smiled as soon as Sansa or Arya or any of their brothers walked into a room, and today was no different, serious expressions on Mother and Father’s faces aside.

“How’s my pretty girl?” he called, crossing the room in quick strides to sweep her up into a hug, one she gladly returned. “Oh, pardon me – welcome to the Wallmaker’s Observatory, Abhorsen-in-Waiting. What business brings you here?”

“Shut up, Granddad,” she laughed, kissing the tiny strip of bare cheek between beard and eye. “And thank you for your lovely gift-“

“Practical gift,” he corrected her. “It just happens to be pretty, that’s all.”

“Thank you,” she said firmly, leaning into his side when he wrapped his arm around her shoulders and guided her to the map table where he had been conferring with Mother and Father. “I didn’t know Ben was going to be here, Granddad.”

“Neither did we,” Granddad admitted. “But he came on official business – an invitation to the first of two royal weddings before Midwinter.”

“Princess Daenerys’ wedding?” Sansa asked, surprised. “But- ah. She wants Jon to come, does she?”

“Yes, she does,” Mother sighed. “And all of us – although how she thinks putting Lya and the Queen in the same room together with the King is a good idea, I don’t know. She’s _supposed_ to be a clever girl.”

“She is,” Sansa said with a smile, reading over the invitation that Father had handed to her. “If the King is trying to keep Lya from Queen Elia, then he won’t be bothering Arya and Prince Aegon about this nonsense of his – combining the Bloodlines,” she added scornfully, shaking her head. “I ask you.”

“The berserker blood shows up in funny ways,” Granddad said with a grimace. “So, pretty girl, you think we should go to Belisaere for this wedding?”

“Well, we’ll all have to go for Arya’s wedding the day before the Midwinter Festival, so we may as well go for this, too,” Sansa said, shrugging and passing the invitation back to Father. “The King talked about some great threat in his letter asking for one of us for the prince, and I’d like to ask what exactly he means – I’ve tried asking Mogget, of course, but he was about as much help as always.”

Mother was frowning, but Sansa was used to that – Mother had been frowning an awful lot since the King’s letter had arrived at the House.

“Why would someone send a damned necromancer and a Mordicant as a test?” she burst out suddenly, fists clenching. “That implies organisation, planning – but the girl was so weak, so foolish, that she can have been nothing but a test. She didn’t even try to move into Death!”

Sansa bit her lip, because loathe though she was to admit it, Mother was right – the fight had been too easy, too neat.

“What are the Others, Mother? You said you would not tell me until we were at the House, but surely we are safe here?”

Mother’s jaw went tight, the bone sharp under the skin, and she shook her head.

“Not even here,” she said. “I will not speak of those things outside of the House, unless it is with the protection of the Great Charter Stones in Belisaere. When we get home, Sansa – not before then.”

 

* * *

 

“Rhaegar, you must stop this! Daenerys getting married this month, and you’re off with your head in the clouds-“

Elia jumped back when Rhaegar spun to face her, his eyes madder than she ever remembered ( _berserker blood,_ Doran had warned her, _slower to act than his father’s, and less obvious, but potentially more dangerous – I have Seen it)._

Doran Saw a great many things – his Sight was remarkably powerful, as if to make up for the way his body was failing him bit by bit – but they had agreed that, given that Elia had been Seen as mother to a great Queen, she would be safe as Rhaegar’s wife.

Of course, Rhaegar’s insistence that they break every law and tradition and he name Aegon his heir had her worried, but not too much. Oberyn was the one who had Seen Rhaenys as Queen, and while Oberyn’s visions were never so frequent as Doran’s, they were stronger, in some ways, more vibrant and vicious and very, very Oberyn, if it were possible for the Sight to reflect a person.

“I have greater concerns than my sister’s wedding,” he said firmly, clasping his hands behind his back as he began to pace the length of the solar again.

“Lord Mormont and his family have guarded the Crossing Point for generations,” Elia rebuked him, “for little reward and little thanks. For his son to be marrying a princess is a great honour, of course, but see reason – he will think the Clayr manipulated you into this, Rhaegar, if you do not seem to be at least interested in proceedings!”

“There are more important things than the feelings of some petty Borderlander!” Rhaegar shouted, abruptly furious. Many would have balked at his rare rage.

Elia crossed her arms and raised a quelling brow.

“Just as the Baratheons are petty, hmm?” she demanded coldly. “For wanting recompense for your completely unlawful murder of their brother? Just as the Wallmakers are petty for not accepting your absurd logic for taking Lyanna? Just as Abhorsen Catelyn was petty for refusing to bear you another child, just as her sister was petty for refusing you the same? Just as my brothers are petty for not forgiving the shame you brought on me by fathering a child by another woman? It seems to me as if everyone who disagrees with you or does not fit into your neat little plans is petty, Rhaegar. A shame – I respect a great many petty people, it would seem.”

That stopped him, alright, and he had the good grace to look a little bit embarrassed.

“You have to understand, Elia,” he pleaded. “The fate of the world rests on Aegon’s marriage – I must guide him-“

“Oh, he’s twenty-five years old,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You want him to get a pretty girl pregnant – I’m sure he’ll work it out for himself.”

 

* * *

 

Sansa slept most of the way back to the House, stirring only when Mother called for her to sing the Paperwing down. Her wrist was aching again – Mother hadn’t healed it all the way, and she’d forgotten to ask Granddad to do it for her while they were at the Tower, and she had no head for healing marks and would probably have done more harm than good had she turned to it herself – and so were her ribs, partially from the long hours cramped in the Paperwing and partially because of how new the tightness of her bandoleer was while fighting.

“Arya and Rickon are both here, aren’t they?” she asked, stifling a yawn as they climbed down onto the platform, both walking on shaky legs. “I wonder if there’ve been any visitors or messages since we’ve been gone.”

“It’s not been two days,” Mother laughed, but she was exhausted, Sansa could see it in the way she carried her left leg slightly – she’d been bitten by a Dead Hand years ago, and she’d let the wound fester instead of healing it because there’d been a necromancer to fight, and she still limped sometimes while tired or cold. “Are you expecting something?”

“No, just curious,” Sansa said, yawning fully now and wandering along in Mother’s wake as they made their way along the Charter-lit path to the front door. “I am looking forward to a bath.”

“Me too,” Mother agreed fervently, and the door swung open just before they reached it to reveal Arya in a dress.

“I’m trying them out,” she said. “Do you suppose I could alter them for riding?”

 

* * *

 

Willas staggered back into Oberyn’s arms when the vision released him, his eyes stinging slightly from being so wide open for such a long time.

“That was an unpleasant one,” he said tightly, pinching the bridge of his nose as he straightened up. “Charter, I haven’t had a headache from the Sight since I was a child.”

“You Saw up north, though?” Oberyn said eagerly, dark eyes bright.

“I don’t know,” Willas admitted. “There was snow, but we’re not that long from Midwinter – there’ll be snow all over the realm by now, surely? Well, except on the Plains, but most of the country is snowbound. As for the people I Saw? Southerlings, maybe, but there were others with them – I don’t know. The Wall, maybe? I saw Wallmaker yellow on one of the men, but other people than the Wallmakers wear yellow.”

“The broken trowel, you said,” Tyrion mused from his seat on the nearest reading table (an offence he’d have anyone else strung up for, because Tyrion was amusingly particular about the Library’s furniture and fittings). “A Wallmaker is to die, maybe? There are plenty of them now – old Rickard himself, Brandon and Ned and Lyanna, Ned’s son and Lyanna’s boy, too. Benjen probably counts, too, what with him being of the blood, even if he did choose to join the Guard.”

“Southerlings, though,” Oberyn said. “They’ve always been more loyal to the Wallmakers than the crown.”

“Prince Sameth did defy his father to settle the Southerlings in the Old Kingdom,” Willas pointed out. “It makes sense that they’d turn to his descendants.”

“Especially considering the madness from the royal line seems to have left the Wallmakers largely untouched,” Tyrion agreed. “Bah, this will get us nowhere – do we report it?”

Willas frowned and looked down at the floor, deep in thought. _The Wallmaker was young,_ he thought. _Barely more than a boy – there’s only one Wallmaker that young, and that’s Sansa’s brother._

“A Wallmaker won’t _die,_ I don’t think,” he said quietly. “But he’ll be ruined – broken, I said? That’s not… That’s not quite right. And he’ll have a Southerling and… Someone else, someone I don’t recognise, with him. And there is something wrong with the Wall, too, something weakened, I think? Something that needs to be remade or repaired or something. I don’t fully understand it.”

He sighed.

“I _hate_ Seeing without the Watch.”

 

* * *

 

“A _Mordicant,_ ” Arya gasped, curled up on the end of Sansa’s bed with a heavy blanket wrapped around her shoulders. “And you won against it?”

“It was all in the Book,” Sansa said, shrugging uneasily. “But Mother said that it wasn’t as strong as it should have been, and that the necromancer she fought was still wet behind the ears.”

“Still, Sansa – a _Mordicant_ on your first time out with Mother! Did you use the bells?”

Mother hammered a terrible fear of the bells into all of them almost before they could walk, so Sansa understood why Arya’s voice became hushed and almost reverent then.

“Kibeth and Saraneth,” she said, setting aside her hairbrush and coming to sit with Arya. “Kibeth felt… Strange. I can’t explain it, really – it was as if it was trying to make the whole world dance. Saraneth was steady, though – I felt as if I could trust it.”

They sat in silence for a long moment, and Sansa missed Bran horribly – he was often the only way for Sansa and Arya to maintain a long conversation, because Bran got along with everyone but Sansa and Arya had so little in common.

“You seem in better humour than you were,” she commented, nudging Arya’s foot with her own. “Did Rickon make an idiot of himself while Mother and I were gone?”

To Sansa’s surprise, Arya blushed and ducked her head, reaching for Sansa’s sore wrist – Arya had always been good at healing, almost as good as Bran – and muttering something under her breath.

“What?”

“I had a letter from Prince Aegon,” Arya admitted. “And no, you can’t see it, because he recorded it as marks and it’ll only play for me.”

Sending a letter of Charter marks, special marks that recorded speech and locked it so that only the intended recipient would hear, was expensive and dangerous, not least because it was possible to corrupt such marks and turn them into traps – Prince Aegon must have been as nervous as Arya about their impending marriage to expend such resources.

“And?”

“He seems… Alright, I suppose? He says he inherited the Sight from his mother and has no intention of usurping his sister’s claim to the throne, and he asked me to pass on his regards to Jon. I don’t know what to make of him, Sansa!”

“Did you write back?”

“I was hoping you’d tell me what to say,” Arya said, setting the last mark in the chain around Sansa’s wrist and casting the master mark – Sansa sighed with relief as the pain disappeared. “You’re better at this sort of thing, after all.”

Sansa hesitated, wondering how to explain to Arya that just because she knew about things like how to dress and dancing and proper behaviour did not, by any means, mean that she knew how to _flirt._

“When have I ever had someone trying to romance me?” she asked, forcing her voice light. “Arya-“

“All those Clayr you told Mother and Father about,” Arya pointed out. “Did one of them really See you marrying a Clayr? Your children could be _Remembrancers,_ Sansa!”

“Yes, well, if the Clayr who attempted to court me are any indication, I’ll only be marrying one if he gets knocked on the head and thinks I’m someone else, because he-“

She clamped her mouth shut, determinedly ignoring her blush, and took her notebook and a pen from her nightstand.

“What shall you talk to Prince Aegon about, then?”

 

* * *

 

“You don’t need me to hold your hand,” Jorah huffed, but he kept a firm grip on Dany’s hand nonetheless as she walked along the top of the wall that separated the patio from the fountains.

“You like holding my hand,” Dany teased, laughing when Jorah caught her about the waist and spun her down when she tried to jump. “And besides, you worry if I so much as walk down the stairs.”

Jorah grumbled at that, but it was true – he saw himself as much as her protector as her soon-to-be-husband, and that amused her almost as much as his reluctance to dance did.

He was not a good looking man, as Rhaenys was always quick to tell her, but he was tall and strong (and he looked more like the bear on his coat-of-arms than Dany would ever admit to her niece, with all that black hair and that frowning face), and under his gruffness (which was at least a little bit shyness) he was very kind and loyal.

“Dance with me,” she demanded, taking one of his hands and setting her own hand on his shoulder, and he frowned.

“There is no music-“

“I can sing,” she laughed. “Oh, do _smile,_ Jorah! You will be meeting my other nephew by the end of the week, and once Aegon and the Abhorsen’s daughter are wed we can return to the Crossing Point and I will help you figure out what’s wrong. But first, _dance_ with me.”

He huffed again, but he did as he was told – he was a terrible dancer, it was true, but when she didn’t take offence to the way he stepped on her toes constantly he did relax a bit, and he had a lovely smile when he deigned to show it.

“There now,” she said softly, when they’d waltzed the full round of the fountains. “That wasn’t so bad, was it? And think, that’s all we must do for our first dance, too.”

She understood his impatience to be gone, of course, because the reports from the Crossing Point – indeed, from the whole of the Wall – had been dark for months now, months and months, but Rhaegar was so consumed with the problems to the north that he was ignoring everything else. Dany had spoken with Elia and Aegon about it, had asked them to try Seeing to the south and to ask the same of the Clayr, but Rhaegar had heard of her inquiries and ordered her to stop it.

She hadn’t, of course. She’d just become more discreet, had taken to asking Jon for direct reports when she wrote to him (just because Rhaegar ignored the existence of the son he’d nearly caused a war to conceive didn’t mean Dany was going to ignore a nephew who she was actually very fond of and who was a great deal more sensible than anyone else in the family except Elia and occasionally Rhaenys). The problems in the north, whatever it was that was driving the clansmen south, they were worrisome, yes, but Rhaegar was a fool to ignore trouble at the _Wall,_ at one of the strongest sources of the Charter in the realm.

“My brother will be home soon,” she offered. “Viserys – he was in Ancelstierre this past year or more. He is… Interesting, I suppose. They say the berserker blood is strong in him, but I’ve always thought him to just be very high-spirited.”

Jorah’s mouth twisted and Dany knew he was trying his very best to be diplomatic, which never worked and always served to amuse her.

 

* * *

 

“You haven’t visited in too long, Shireen,” Bran said, swinging down from the roof and hanging upside down in front of her. “How is Nestowe, sweetheart?”

Shireen rolled her eyes and patted Bran’s cheek.

“Thriving, as always,” she told him. “Turn the right way up and I might give you a proper hello. Is Meera about?”

“She’s in the Library with Granddad, I think,” Bran said. “Something about a land dispute with the crown, she needs the records of what land Prince Sameth designated for her people. Jojen’ll take them back with him – Meera’s thinking of staying on a few days.”

“Good,” Shireen said. “So am I. Now, tell me what you’re doing, hanging from the ceiling – why is it I suspect your father has no idea about this?”

“It’s all Uncle Brandon’s fault.”

“And I believe that, too.”

“It’s usually Brandon’s fault.”

“So you always say. Come down from there, Bran, you look an idiot.”

He grinned and unbuckled himself, landing neatly before her and turning his cheek for a kiss, which she didn’t give (as always). Shireen was taller than him by four inches, nearly, and slight and willowy and far more beautiful than she seemed to think – the scarring on her cheek, a burn from a necromancer’s touch when she was only small and there had been an attempt to take Nestowe and, with it, one of the main ports in the Old Kingdom, made her self-conscious, although Bran had never understood why that was.

“You tell me that no matter what I’m doing,” he pointed out. “What brings you to the Wallmaker’s Tower, my lady? Business, or pleasure?”

“Business, Bran, as always,” she sighed, linking her arm through his and pushing him to guide her deeper into the Tower. “The Northerners have started sailing south and putting in at Nestowe because the King will not accept them at Belisaere.”

“And you come to us? Why not to the Palace?”

Shireen raised an eyebrow, and Bran sighed.

“Very well,” he agreed. “I’ll bring you to Granddad – and if he’s not with Meera in the Library, then I’ll find Father. He might know some way to help.”

 

* * *

 

“So the Portsmaster says that there’s been a sudden influx of Northerners into Nestowe,” Mother said over breakfast the following morning, stroking the head of the message hawk that the sendings brought her while she poured tea. “And he asks that I come and test them for Free Magic.”

“The wards in the harbour should be enough,” Sansa said, slipping her hand under the table to give a handful of kippers to Mogget, who licks her fingers in thanks. “The breakers are not yet ten years old, they can’t be worn out yet, surely?”

“He’s a pedantic fool,” Mother confided with a grin, “but he means well – we will have to leave early for the wedding, you and I, and make a stop at Nestowe on the way. Doubtless he will have some objection to raise about how close his daughter is to Bran, too-“

“Oh, bugger that,” Arya said, reaching across for the jam (her fingers, covered in sticky blackcurrant preserve, dipped under the table for a moment, too, and she squirmed while they were there – Arya always had been ticklish). “Bran is going to be the Wallmaker when Granddad and Brandon and Father all retire, he’s a good match-“

“He’s got that thing with the Patriarch’s daughter, though,” Rickon pointed out (his hand was under the table too, this time with eggs – how on earth did Mogget eat so much?). “Maybe the Portsmaster knows that. I mean, everyone _else_ knows it, don’t they?”

“No, Rickon,” Mother said sternly, a warning in her frown, “they do not, and until Bran stops behaving like your uncle, we would rather it stay that way.”

“Oh. Yes, Mother.”

Arya was stifling a giggle, and Sansa almost sighed – why was it Arya could never understand that yes, it really _did_ matter what other people thought of them? Arya seemed to think Mother’s bandoleer negated all rumours and whispers, but if people did not respect the Abhorsen, how could they trust her to protect them? Then again, Arya refused to understand that something as silly as _other people’s opinions_ could possibly matter to someone like them.

“I could go to Nestowe,” Sansa offered. “We’re all due in Belisaere for Princess Daenerys’ wedding soon anyways, I could take one of the Paperwings and make a detour-“

“And what if there _is_ a Free Magic sorcerer? What if there’s a powerful necromancer? What if-“

“What if you trusted in me and my training-“

“You’ve only been training a month-“

“What do you think I was doing in the Clayr’s Library, Mother?” Sansa demanded. “I was _studying!_ The Book of the Dead may be the definitive volume, but it is _not_ the only text that deals with Charter-bound necromantic magic! I can-“

“You studied- the Librarians _allowed_ you to study necromantic magic?”

Sansa drew back at that.

“Of course they did,” she said, confused. “I was there with your permission – should they have forbidden access of the books that would actually be useful to me? Should I have spent my time reading histories and ledgers?”

“I didn’t think you were studying things that you had _no right_ to study at the time! You were not Abhorsen-in-Waiting then, Sansa!”

“I am prepared to go to Nestowe regardless, Mother!” she argued, standing up and leaning over the table. “I can-“

“I will accompany her,” Mogget said, slinking up onto the table. “If it will set your mind at ease, Abhorsen – it has been _many_ years since I visited Nestowe. It was a Dead-ridden fishing village when last I saw it.”

“When was that?” Rickon asked, always eager to draw stories from Mogget.

“Not long after the Abhorsen Sabriel crossed the Wall from Ancelstierre, before she fought Kerrigor,” Mogget said, as if it were nothing to talk of one of the most famous Abhorsens  _ever_ , as well as one of the most feared Greater Dead in history. “The Abhorsen-in-Waiting will be in safe hands with me, Abhorsen, of that you can have no doubt.”

Mother frowned for a long moment, but then she shook her head.

“No, Mogget,” she said, “I have need of you here – Rickon, you will go with your sister to Nestowe, and you will ensure that the Portsmaster’s demands are met before you fly to Belisaere.”

 

* * *

 

The tug of the river lessened and lessened and eased and stopped, and for the first time in thirty years Ramsay felt the warmth of Life on his face (or at least, what served as his face now).

Then he noticed an all-too-familiar figure standing to his right, taller than him but smoother, more human, but with the same pale fires burning in his eyes.

“Father,” he said, shifting away (ah, movement, unfettered by the draw of the current, how he had missed this). “Is this your doing?”

“No,” a voice called from behind them. “It is mine.”

The two Greater Dead, shadows of malice with Free Magic burning within, turned.

“You are old for a necromancer,” Ramsay said, already feeling for the weaknesses in the crabbed old bastard’s Life.

“And you’ve not been out long enough to take me,” he said. “Not with my boys around.”

Ramsay looked around, taking for the first time in the surprising number of Hands, both Dead and Shadow, in the clearing.

The old bastard grinned.

_“Heh.”_

 

* * *

 

Rickon, apparently, had a habit of singing while flying. Sansa didn’t mind, much – he was better company than Arya would have been, because Arya would have protested to not being allowed to fly the Paperwing, because Arya would have tried to whistle control away from Sansa, because Arya would have never been able to bear standing two steps behind Sansa when they reached Nestowe.

The interlude the night before had been one of very few easy times Sansa ever remembered sharing with her sister, and it stung to know that Arya had been motivated to seek out Sansa’s company only because she thought Sansa could be _useful_ to her in responding to Prince Aegon’s letter.

“Sing with me, Sanny!” Rickon called over the wind, and when Sansa glanced back he was smiling and laughing and looked enough like Robb for it to hurt.

“One of us has to have enough voice left to sing us down, Rickon!” she called back, sticking out her tongue when he groaned in teasing frustration and tugged the end of her plait.

“Sing on the way home, then,” he bargained, leaning forward so he didn’t have to shout. “And I’ll sing us down when we get back to the House.”

“We’re going straight to Belisaere, Rickon,” she laughed, “as well you know – do you plan on singing the Paperwing down into the Palace, where you’ve never been before?”

Rickon wouldn’t have been able to sing the Paperwing down even if they had been going home from Nestowe, because much and all as he enjoyed singing he distrusted the Paperwings with the sort of wariness he usually reserved for large cats and spiders, and he was appallingly bad at weather magic – even when he whistled a breeze, it always seemed to turn into a storm.

“Keep singing,” she called back to him when he settled into his seat again, because it was nice to spend time with Rickon, who didn’t frown at her when she sang all her magic. “It’ll make the time pass quicker.”

“Oi! I’m not _that_ bad!”

 

* * *

 

“Mother, I need to speak with you,” Aegon said firmly, completely ignoring Rhaegar, who was pacing the length of the sitting room over and over. “Will you walk with me in the gardens?”

Elia smiled and left Rhaegar to his mumbling plotting and followed Aegon down the tunnel to-

“The Great Charter Stones?” she asked, not objecting as he guided her down onto the raft and then out into the heart of the reservoir. “Aegon-“

“I need to speak with you in private,” he said. “And I do not want Father to overhear – or Rhaenys, for that matter.”

Elia sat patiently as the raft halted right in the centre of the circle of stones – each one tall and golden and warm and bright with Charter magic, the strongest sources of the Charter in the realm save perhaps the Wall or the Wallmaker’s Stone at Barhedrin. Aegon cast the marks needed to prevent eavesdroppers, cast them high up onto the nearest Stone so they bounced around the rest, forming a web of golden light around them and their raft.

“Now then, sweet boy,” she said, motioning for him to sit with her. “What is it?”

“I Saw her again,” he said, pulling his legs tight to his chest. “Arya. I- I keep Seeing her, Mother. All of the time, little flashes here and there – I was with Dany and Barristan on the walls this morning and I nearly fell off, because _I can’t stop Seeing her!”_

“How many times a day do you think you See her?”

“Nine, ten-“

“Surely not?” Nine or ten visions a day was unheard of in one as young as Aegon! “Maybe we should postpone the wedding – I’ve tried convincing your father that it was wrong of him to refuse to allow you to go to the Glacier, but he _must_ admit-“

“Don’t tell him,” Aegon said, eyes wide. “Please, Mother, don’t tell Father – he won’t understand. He’ll say I’m just stalling, that I’m not _doing my duty._ He’ll chain me to the throne if he thinks I’m planning on leaving the city.”

“What do you See of her, then? Maybe I can be of some help – between us, surely we can decipher this.”

“I See her with a dog,” he said uneasily. “A biggish mongrel, tan with a black back and the strangest collar.”

 

* * *

 

“You know,” Wylla said, “Touchstone the first was a bastard prince.”

“His royal parent wasn’t mad,” Jon pointed out, holding out a hand to Bran and waiting for the final piece of the music box that was to be his wedding present to Daenerys. Once he’d set it in place, he called up the handful of marks needed to heat the metal and soldered it into place. “My father, on the other hand, is out of his mind, and everyone knows it. I’m happy enough here at the Tower, Wylla, and that’s why I’ll be coming back south as soon as the weddings are over.”

“But surely you want to spend time with your brother and sister?”

“Rhaenys disapproves of me on general principal because our father slept with my mother while married to the Queen,” Jon laughed. “And she and I would never have been close, anyways – she’s too proud for my liking. As for Aegon… He’s more Clayr than Prince, although the King refuses to see it.”

“Your aunt isn’t so bad,” Bran offered, swinging down from the ceiling again like a pendulum (he _always_ seemed to be hanging from the ceilings, especially since Brandon had knocked together that sling contraption for him). “And your uncle is completely mad, but at least he doesn’t hate you.”

“Viserys,” Jon laughed. “Oh, he is _entirely_ mad – why do you think he spends half the year in Ancelstierre and the other half travelling? He’s too unstable to keep in Belisaere, the King wouldn’t know how he’d react to anything from one day to the next.”

It made Wylla sad, the way Jon always referred to his father as the King, but then again, she supposed it made sense – he’d told her himself that he’d rarely had much to do with his father, who purposely held himself apart from the son who was not the fabled hero he’d so wanted.

“Well,” Bran called, unclipping himself from his harness at the door, “this is fascinating, but two of the most beautiful women in the kingdom are waiting for me to have lunch with them, so I will see both of _you_ at dinner – Granddad told me to remind you about getting fitted for your new surcoat, Jon, so don’t forget.”

“I won’t,” Jon shouted back over his shoulder, setting a loop of marks that held a pretty little melody into the heart of the music box and smiling. “Having to get fitted for new clothes is the worst part of a wedding except for dancing.”

“Given much thought to weddings, Wallmaker?” Wylla teased. “I wouldn’t have put you-“

“My wedding,” he said, not looking up from his work. “Ours, if you say yes.”

His cheek, what Wylla could see of it between the edge of his amber-lensed goggles and his dark beard, at least, was bright red, but she couldn’t stop herself from laughing.

“Was that supposed to be a _proposal,_ Jon?!” Because if it was, it was _appalling,_ and she couldn’t stop giggling no matter how mortified he looked when he turned to face her, pushing his goggles back to reveal the deep red ridges on the bridge of his nose and the tops of his cheeks, because that only made her laugh _more._

“Damn it all, Wylla, you know I’m no good at this,” he said plaintively, and she pressed her hands to her mouth to _try_ and stop the giggles, but it wasn’t working very well. “I love you, and I want to marry you. Will you marry me?”

“See now,” she mocked, still laughing a little, “that wasn’t so hard, was it?”

He blushed even more, and Wylla laughed so hard that she had to sit down.

 

* * *

 

“Jon’s asking Wylla,” Bran announced, slamming the Library doors shut behind him with a grin. “About time, too – I thought Granddad was going to march them to the Stone and bind their hands himself, the way they’ve been carrying on.”

“And you’re so much better,” Meera laughed, sitting up and taking her head from Shireen’s lap. “It’s a wonder the Portsmaster hasn’t called for your head yet, little Wallmaker.”

Bran pulled a face and lifted Meera’s feet before sitting down and laying them across his legs.

“Why should he do that?” Bran asked, settling back against the couch with a grin. “Shireen hasn’t let me do anything that could make her father hate me, after all – she’s more than capable of looking after herself.”

“What if I were to do something to make him hate you?” Shireen teased, tipping her head back so all her fine black hair spilled towards the floor. “Say, if I were to ask you to marry me?”

Meera sat up properly, swinging her feet down onto the floor.

“Both of you,” Shireen clarified. “I was in Belisaere a while back and looked through the marriage records – we wouldn’t be the first, you know.”

Bran rubbed his chin thoughtfully, even though Meera still looked worried.

“Granddad would perform the rites for us,” he said slowly. “He’s the Wallmaker, after all, nobody’s going to refuse him that right.”

“My father would give us his blessing,” Meera agreed. “Marriages between three are not uncommon among my people – if anyone questions us, we can blame my bad influence.”

Bran hesitated, though – he loved both Meera and Shireen, and they loved him, and they loved each other, _but…_

“I need to speak to my father,” he said at last. “I’m the Wallmaker’s grandson and the Abhorsen’s son. I need to speak to Father. And maybe Lya.”

 

* * *

 

The practice yards of the Clayr’s Glacier were, as much of their facilities were, enormous rooms carved into the rock of Starmount. They occupied the levels directly above the Library, and it was there that Myrcella found herself fighting for her life.

Not _truly_ fighting for her life, of course – she knew her uncle would never harm her – but there was a thrill to be found in sparring with Jaime that few other opponents except maybe Loras and Oberyn gave her, and neither of _them_ would spar with her very often because Grandfather and Loras’ grandmother and Oberyn’s brother hated one another so much.

She wasn’t as good with a sword as Tommen, which annoyed her – Tommen had the same natural ability as Jaime, as Mother, but he didn’t seem to care about it. He preferred flying Paperwings and sitting in the Library with Tyrion, which was all well and good, but Tommen could be _more_ than just a Paperwing pilot if he _tried._

If Tommen wasn’t going to do it, then Myrcella would – she would become the youngest Captain of the Observatory Guard ever, would make Grandfather proud (because he was never happy). She wouldn’t fail him, the way Joff had with the Abhorsen’s daughter.

“Oops,” Jaime teased when his blunted practice sword slipped past Myrcella’s guard and tapped her on the chest. “Distracted again by wild dreams, little niece?”

She shoved his blade away, angry with herself for letting him win.

“Again,” she said firmly. “I _will_ beat you, Jaime, just you wait and see.”

Something odd flickered in Jaime’s eyes – not the Sight, but maybe a memory – and he smiled softly.

“Oh, I don’t doubt you will,” he said, and then they were off again.

Myrcella fought harder when she caught the golden glimmer of Mother’s hair in the gallery, and harder still when she noticed Grandfather there, great leather ledgers held to his chest (Chief Bursar, controlling all the finances of the Clayr, every last copper).

Jaime won, but it was a closer contest this time, she hoped. And he’d promised-

“Yes,” he laughed, before she could even open her mouth. “I trust you – but only if you bring Tommen. I wouldn’t want you and Joff in the same Paperwing unless there was no other choice.”

Myrcella whooped in delight and quickly stripped off her practice armour so she could run down to the Library to find Tommen, because tonight – tonight, they were going on Patrol!

 

* * *

 

The Portsmaster was a tall man with thinning black hair and dark blue eyes and gaunt cheeks, and he had no time for standing on ceremony.

“You expect me to test four _hundred_ people individually?” Sansa asked incredulously, reaching out automatically to catch Rickon’s wrist – he always reacted strongly to other people’s anger, snapping back with his own. “And you expect me to do so without my brother’s help?”

“Your brother is a _child,”_ Stannis Baratheon, Master of the Ports, said dismissively. “How can he help you?”

“He is the Abhorsen’s son,” Sansa said, wishing the Portsmaster was more like his daughter. She _liked_ Shireen, but Stannis… “Rickon will help me with the testing, my lord – you do not have a monopoly on my time. I am Abhorsen-in-Waiting, and I have other duties.”

He seemed mollified by that, because he dismissed them to go about their _duties –_ which he said with the most thinly veiled disdain Sansa had ever heard.

His harbour master was much more personable – Lord Davos was a neat man with a rough accent and missing fingers (“I was a smuggler, ma’am,” he told her with a grin. “And I did the Portsmaster a service, so he took my fingers instead of my head”).

“We’ve put them up in the old quarter,” he explained, leading Sansa and Rickon across the bridge, blithely ignoring the looks and whispers that followed them because of Sansa’s bells and the keys on their blue surcoats (and the trowel, on Rickon’s). “The Portsmaster wanted to move them on, but there’s nowhere for them to go.”

The Northerners – barbarians, Sansa thought guiltily, especially considering if she followed her own lineage back she would find one of them, on Father’s side – were crammed in with not enough room, in dark, crowded halls that were cool and sometimes cold, Sansa found as she made her way through them, searching out any hint of Free Magic and-

_“Sansa! Over here!”_

She pushed her way through the crowds – Charter, they were all big and strong and fierce and wearing an awful lot of fur – to where Rickon was standing with one of his swords to some man’s neck-

And Sansa felt as if she’d stepped through a waterfall, a chill washing down her spine and rising gooseflesh all across her skin.

“Everyone back!” she shouted, and Rickon repeated her order in the Old Tongue (he’d always had a head for languages). The Northerners shouted things – she didn’t know what – when she drew Nehima, Charter marks glowing brighter than those on Rickon’s sword, and approached the man.

“What manner of thing are you?” she asked, setting the tip of her blade to his throat beside Rickon’s and drawing Saraneth.

“Sansa,” Rickon whispered, “the chief says that this man has been dead for three days. He says they left him for the waves three nights past – they put him overboard, I mean, but he’s been dead for three days.”

Sansa probed at the sense of Death in the man – whatever it was that was using him, it was preserving his flesh well, and it was weak, almost too weak for her to pick up on it. She was surprised Rickon had noticed it, until she saw that there was the faintest shadow of a mark on the man’s forehead.

“Northerners aren’t baptised in the Charter,” Sansa said, and without having to be told both she and Rickon leaned forward, pinning the creature to the wall with their swords as it screeched and the mark on its forehead glowed red. “Northerners don’t carry marks on their foreheads!”

Rickon was already stepping away and drawing spelled knives from his belt, his boot, but Sansa was swinging Saraneth and-

“How?” she gasped, staring hard down at the ice that was gathering on silver and mahogany and spreading up her hand from the bell, which was full to overflowing of frost. “What manner of thing are you?”

“Old,” the man said, his voice like cracking ice, and Sansa flinched away from it – but not before laying her arm tight across her bandoleer, because she could feel the bells starting to vibrate with the cold-

Rickon’s touch on her arm was hot, though, _scalding_ hot, and the marks he threw seemed tinged with red under the Charter gold.

The creature smouldered, embers at the foot of the wall, and Sansa carefully cleaned out Saraneth’s mouth while Rickon collected their swords.

Neither mentioned that the scent of charred flesh was overlaid with the metallic sharpness of Free Magic.

“Tell them that the rest of them are free to go once they have the Portsmaster’s permission,” Sansa said, flexing the fingers that had almost been fused to Saraneth with the cold only moments before. “Tell them… Tell them whatever you think will explain this away, Rickon, because I surely can’t.”

 

* * *

 

Mother was spending every moment locked away in either the Library or her study with Mogget, pouring over books so old that they crumbled to dust in sunlight, never mind to touch.

“What are you researching?” Arya asked, again and again, trying to get it out of Mother, who usually said “Not now,” and Mogget, who either hissed and swiped at her with those sharp little claws of his, or looked up at her with those _horrible_ green eyes of his and said “It’s not for the likes of _you_ to know, _child.”_

Arya had always hated Mogget – or rather, she was fairly certain that _he_ hated _her,_ because he only really seemed to like Bran and the other Wallmakers, so she sometimes wondered why he stayed at the House and not the Tower – but this was different. He’d always condescended to her horribly, more so than he ever had to her brothers or Sansa (maybe he’d seen that Sansa was Mother’s true heir, even years ago?), but he had at least drip-fed her bits and pieces of information. It was as if by surrendering and starting to wear dresses, she’d made everyone see her as weak and useless, just a lady to be kept around until they could move her on.

The sendings had gone into a frenzy, and new dresses were appearing in her room every morning – blue and navy and yellow and gold and silver and red, horrible bloody royal red that washed her out and made her look sickly, but she was to marry a prince and become a princess and so the sendings had laid out every possible red item of clothing aside from a red bloody surcoat, with silver keys and golden towers quartered on the breast.

She’d sent a letter to Aegon, with Sansa’s recommendations carefully included, and she’d made sure not to swear – she wasn’t sure if he’d approve, what with him being a prince and all, but she felt stupid and silly, behaving like Sansa.

She didn’t mind the dresses too much – most of them had odd skirts that meant she could still ride, and they weren’t as swishy as the ones Sansa liked, which always swirled around her ankles as she walked and had big, wide sleeves and were entirely impractical – but she hated the way the sendings had taken to forcing her into a chair every morning so they could style her hair. She liked wearing her hair back in one braid, the way Mother wore hers, but the sendings had seen her wearing dresses as an opportunity not to be wasted and were trying to turn her into Sansa.

While Sansa was getting to be _her,_ which wasn’t fair at all. Arya still wasn’t sure that the sendings had done the right thing in laying the bells out for Sansa, but every time she tried to raise the issue with Mother she was told not to be _bitter._ She wasn’t being _bitter,_ thank you very much, but-

Robb would have understood. Robb had always done his best to protect Sansa, because while Sansa was clever and did her best at everything (and usually ended being quite good at it, because she refused to give in until she _was_ good at it), Sansa was also… Soft, somehow. There was a softness about her that had Arya worried – how could someone so gentle really keep the kingdom safe from the Dead?

How could someone so gentle _survive_ keeping the kingdom safe from the Dead?

 

* * *

 

The harbour master was waiting outside for them, and seemed to pick up on their disquiet – he led them back across the bridge without speaking, but as soon as there was running water between them and the Northerners, he stepped as close to them as he could and frowned.

“The Portsmaster might not pick up on it, but there are others who’ll notice the reek of Free Magic from your brother,” he said quietly, raising one eyebrow. “You might want to do something about that, just in case he does – his lordship is finicky about that sort of thing.”

Rickon opened his mouth to object, but Sansa cut him off. “It was the creature,” she said firmly. “Whatever that thing was that was possessing that dead man – it was a Free Magic thing.”

“Oh, really?” Lord Davos said. “Funny thing about that is, ma’am, neither me nor any of my lads sensed it – and we would, if you don’t mind me saying.”

Sansa frowned, trying to think back into the history of Nestowe-

“What did you smuggle in, Lord Davos?” she asked, hand already going for a bell (Ranna, this time). “Tell me true.”

His grin was dark, and his Charter mark looked subtly wrong, as though it had been laid over scarred skin.

“There was a reason my ship had black sails, ma’am,” he said. “But I killed the bastard that killed Lord Stannis’ wife and tried to kill little Shireen, so instead of killing _me,_ he burned my black sails, took half my sword hand and brought me to Belisaere for a new baptism. Said a sailor like me was too rare to kill, so he set me as harbour master and gave me a house that makes certain that I have to walk past the memorial for those I helped kill every morning and every night.”

“You were a necromancer?” Rickon asked, reaching for his sword.

“No, little soldier, I was merely a disciple – she was very convincing, was the Lady Melisandre. She had ways of seeing, not in ice as the Clayr do but in red fire, but she saw enough to ensure that we all believed she was telling the truth. Ice, ice coming to cover the world, ice that her bells couldn’t fight.”

Sansa’s stomach dropped as Lord Davos laughed at what he was dismissing for madness.

“We’ll tell the Portsmaster that it was a Mordaut,” Sansa decided after a moment. “Best that we don’t mention this until I can discuss it with my mother and my grandfather.”

“The Wallmaker?”

“And I might have to visit the Clayr,” she said, motioning for Lord Davos to continue up the hill. “I don’t know what that was, but the Chief Librarian might – he has an amazing knowledge of _old_ things.”

Lord Davos blinked once or twice, but then he shrugged and continued up the hill.

“Nestowe’s not as old as Belisaere,” he said, gesturing to the broad, straight, meticulously cobbled streets, “but it was built entirely on the Wallmaker’s plans near a century and a half ago. Best laid out city in the kingdom, even if it smells too much like fish for the posh lot to live here.”

Rickon laughed, but Sansa was looking at the heavy cornerstones in all the pavements.

“The Abhorsens helped build the city,” she said absently, pointing. “Those slabs, they’re wards, like the bulwarks in the harbour but permanent.”

“The bulwarks are like the wind flutes the far side of the Wall, from what I’ve heard,” Lord Davos agreed. “We only got past them because your granduncle had died and your mother hadn’t arrived to replace the bulwarks yet – they only live as long as the Abhorsen who crafts them.”

Sansa shuddered at the thought – she remembered Uncle Brynden dying, remembered the havoc because he’d gone missing and nobody had been sure if he was dead or alive because Mother had been off dealing with something at the other end of the country – and forced herself to remember that she was safe.

Except Rickon had, somehow, used Free Magic. She’d tested his mark, of course, and it had still been clear, she’d still fallen into the endless warmth of the Charter as soon as she’d touched her fingers to his skin, but _Free Magic!_ How could he have used Free Magic? And _instinctually,_ too, as if it were a part of him!

Lord Stannis looked up when they entered, apparently disgruntled that Lord Davos had decided not to bother knocking.

“It’s done,” Sansa said. “There was one man carrying a Mordaut, and we were too late to save him, but we destroyed it. The Northerners are clear.”

“Thank you, ma’am - although it could’ve been quicker. The city is yours until you chose to leave.”

Sansa caught Rickon’s wrist to hold him back and together, once they had retrieved their packs, they took their leave.

“What an ass,” Rickon growled, and Sansa laughed and ruffled his hair ( _hot metallic burning soldered metal what caused it how did he do it why did he do it is he broken)_ and looped her arm through his _(no this is little Rickon it must have been the creature making his Charter magic appear as something else)_.

“Come on, then,” she said. “We have to be gone early in the morning, there’s a week’s festivities before the wedding and we’re expected to be there for at least some of them.”

 

* * *

 

Davos folded his arms and sat down when Stannis went to the window to watch the Abhorsen-in-Waiting and her brother walk through the city.

“Come on, then,” he said. “You’ve been forming an opinion since the moment she sang her Paperwing down – what do you think?”

“Singing it down,” Stannis said. “ _Singing –_ what kind of an Abhorsen sings her magic?”

“One with a pretty voice, I’d imagine,” Davos said, shrugging. “And the Abhorsen-in-Waiting certainly has that, even you have to admit.”

“Hmph,” Stannis grumped, and Davos grinned. “She’ll stand her ground, at least.”

“Reminds me of Shireen in that regard,” Davos agreed. “Good thing to see in a young person – she’ll be a fine Abhorsen, I think. Handled that Mordaut without any fuss, didn’t she?”

“I need an interpreter for the Old Tongue,” Stannis said, tapping anxious fingers on his belt, right by the gold-and-white braid wound round the buckle. “There’s something bothering the Northerners.”

“Probably just the magic,” Davos said. “They’re not used to our sort, you know that – theirs is-“

“Wild and unconstrained and dangerous,” Stannis broke in, turning away from the window. “A bit like her little hellion of a brother.”

“I like her brother,” Davos said. “Bit rough around the edges, not very good with people – who does that sound like?”

Stannis looked up in surprise, and Davos laughed to have caught him so off-guard.

“You can’t think the boy’s like _me!”_ Stannis exclaimed, and Davos stood up and clapped Stannis on the shoulder.

“I would never say such a thing,” he said, darting for the door before Stannis could bite back.

He touched the bracelet of leather and gold-and-white braid on the wrist of his maimed hand, and wondered how they’d ever managed to reconcile the two.

 

* * *

 

“She’s my aunt,” Jon said, “and she’s not that bad, really. She’s a bit…”

“Outgoing,” Mum said, and Jon smiled in thanks. “Daenerys is by far and away the sanest of the three, though – be careful with her brothers, and with the Princess. She doesn’t like you-“

“Mum,” Jon said gently. “I know. Stop worrying. I’ll be home with you after Arya’s wedding, you know that.”

“Well, just don’t let _him_ bully you into anything,” Mum said firmly. “And keep Wylla with you, and-“

“Stay close to Uncle Ned,” Jon broke in. “Mum, I _know._ I don’t like it any more than you do, but… He is my father, Mum, and they _are_ my family.”

“No,” Mum disagreed. “They’re your blood. _We_ are your family.”

Jon rolled his eyes and kissed Mum’s cheek before climbing up into the Paperwing in front of Wylla, who had her hair braided back and pinned up and hidden under a leather flight cap. Uncle Ned and Bran were already well on their way to Belisaere, he supposed, because they had left earlier that morning and hadn’t been subject to a long talk from Granddad about proper behaviour before marriage.

Jon blushed just thinking of how serious Granddad had been until he’d gotten to the end of his talk, when he’d promptly burst out laughing the way he did whenever Sansa or Arya did something amusing or told him some silly story (he’d always quite unashamedly favoured his granddaughters over his grandsons, but with the best of humour so it was impossible to be annoyed with him for it), and snapped his goggles into place.

“I’ll see you at Arya’s wedding?” he called down to Mum, who folded her arms tightly and nodded.

“She’d kill me if I missed it,” Mum laughed. “Go on, Jon – but be careful. _Promise_ me.”

“I _promise,_ ” he shouted, and then he reached into the Charter and whistled and the Paperwing hummed to life (which meant Brandon had made it, they were always livelier when he made them than when Uncle Ned did) and they were off.

Wylla’s hair came loose and streamed out behind them like a banner, and when he glanced back to her, Jon was sure he’d never seen anything so beautiful.

 

* * *

 

“Have you ever met the royal family, Sanny?” Rickon called over the wind, leaning close enough that he didn’t have to shout – it was blindingly sunny, a brief respite from the driving sleet that had forced them down three times already and added a day and a half to their journey north, and they were both glad of the deep blue tint to their goggles. “Mother mentioned something about how odd the King is and how I’m not to mention Aunt Lya or Jon unless someone else mentions them first, and I understand _that,_ but what about the rest of them?”

“I’ve met Princess Rhaenys before,” Sansa said thoughtfully. “I was staying with Granddad at the Tower – you were only a little thing at the time, I doubt you’d remember – and she came south with Prince Viserys, the King’s brother.”

“Does Jon look like any of them?”

“Jon looks like Father,” Sansa said with a shrug. “He doesn’t look like Princess Rhaenys – she looks very like her uncle, her mother’s brother, Oberyn. I met him while I was staying with the Clayr, he’s a Paperwing pilot. I think he might be a bit mad, but in a good way, if you know what I mean. The princess is prettier than him, sort of daintier, and everyone says she’s very like the Queen, but I’ve never even seen her.”

“What about the Prince that Arya’s to marry?”

“Aegon? Haven’t a clue. He’s supposed to look very like the King, though, and the King is supposed to be very handsome.”

“Arya hates the idea of getting married,” Rickon confided, digging through his pack for a couple of apples (sealed in Bran’s clever little box that kept them fresh for longer than seemed possible) and passing one forward to her. “She spent all the time you and Mother were away complaining about how she’ll have to behave properly and wear dresses and not be allowed to curse and go riding every day.”

“She seems to think she’ll be chained to the Prince’s side,” Sansa said, rolling her eyes and biting down into her apple. “And what is truly so terrible about dresses, I ask?”

“I remember you used to dress me up in them when I was small,” Rickon said (as though thirteen were old, Sansa thought). “They didn’t seem so bad.”

The vision of Rickon as he was now – gangly and taller than her with shaggy hair and shoulders that seemed far too broad to fit his skinny body – in one of the pretty dresses she used force him into was funny enough to push Arya’s whining from her mind (and Rickon’s squawk of indignation when she strung together a glamour and threw it back over her shoulder so he looked as though he were wearing her favourite navy-blue silk gown with the deep cuffs embroidered with silver keys kept her laughing, even when it began to snow).

 

* * *

 

“I’ll have to use the Reservoir,” Cat said to Mogget over the top of her journal. “There’s nowhere else in the city where I’d feel safe telling Sansa about them.”

Mogget, in his dwarf form, pouted.

“I’d hoped to tell her with you,” he said, hefting another lot of books off Cat’s desk and setting to work replacing them in the shelves. “There is potential in the girl, even I have to admit that. She is… Interesting.”

“How so?” Cat asked, surprised that Mogget was actually speaking about something other than their research – he had been unusually single-minded since she had told him of the mark on the young necromancer’s brow. “Do you believe this story of hers about the Clayr Seeing her?”

“If the Clayr told her they’ve Seen her twice, it means they’ve Seen her at least a dozen times,” Mogget said firmly. “They were always vague, but they’ve become crafty this past while – just like the madness in the royal family has become _true_ madness, not just a touch of berserker blood.”

“But why would they be looking for Sansa? Why would they have been looking for her before Robb…”

_Her boy, her beautiful boy casting mark after mark and she couldn’t get to him, why wasn’t he using his bells, why was he relying on the Charter now, when he had to know it would not be enough? And then there are yellow-grey grave teeth on his pale neck and-_

Mogget’s hand was tight and hard on her wrist, jerking her out of her memory (nightmare?).

“The Clayr have their own motives,” he said quietly, “and they rarely share them with us anymore. In their defence, the Sight is a fickle thing, and I sometimes wonder if they understand it any better than the rest of us do, but that is beside the point.”

“The point being?” Cat asked, shaken as always by thoughts of Robb ( _it was his time, he could not live past his time, an Abhorsen accepts their time)_ but not so much that she forgot why she was here, with Mogget. “What could the Clayr want with Sansa?”

“They know that the last time their Sight was blocked, it took a Remembrancer to save us all,” he said, clicking all the knuckles in his left hand just by flexing his fingers. “Maybe they See the need for another Remembrancer, and Arya is more Wallmaker than Abhorsen.”

“They want Sansa as a breeding mare, then,” Cat sniffed. “I won’t have it, Mogget – I was never sure what Sansa’s path was to be before, but she is Abhorsen-in-Waiting now and I won’t see her lessened just because she’s beautiful.”

 

* * *

 

“It’s bad enough that I have to marry him without having to be there for _another_ wedding-“

Jon ignored Arya’s struggling and walked quickly across the Paperwing platform with her over his shoulder – Wylla was already strapped in, Arya’s things stowed carefully with her own and Jon’s, and it took Jon’s physical strength and Wylla’s skill with magical traps and snares to hold Arya in the Paperwing while Jon said farewell to Cat.

“I’ll make certain she doesn’t offend anyone until I can hand her over to Uncle Ned,” he sighed, rubbing at his shoulder blade, where Arya had tried to bite him through his clothes. “Is Sansa coming?”

“Sansa and Rickon should be there before you,” Cat assured him. “And I will follow on in a few days, Charter willing. Keep her safe, Jon.”

“I will,” he promised, bowing his head in reply to Cat’s smile and waiting until she’d walked away before climbing up into the Paperwing in front of Arya. “And you, stop fussing or I’ll throw you into the harbour when we reach Belisaere – I don’t think you’d like to meet my brother for the first time looking like a drowned rat.”

 

* * *

 

Myrcella’s surcoat was stained dark with Tommen’s blood, dried stiff by the time she breached the safety of the wards.

His screams echoed in her ears as she climbed the hidden steps that, after a long, long climb, led back into Starmount, into the safety of the Glacier. Tommen hadn’t screamed for her to _help_ him, though, even though he was not a strong enough mage to fight off those… Those _things_ on his own – Tommen’s gifts lay in his weather magic, which was part of what made him such a talented Paperwing pilot, and he had never had any great talent for battle marks.

The marks in the steel of her sword seemed weakened, somehow, by their contact with the creature that had reeked of burning metal and death. Myrcella ignored the fear that that set in her chest - for something to corrupt Charter marks as strong as those in her sword, it had to be immensely powerful - and levered herself up to the level of the steps.

If she could just get into Starmount, she could fix this. She could tell Mother and Jaime and Grandfather, and they would help her fix this. They would help her save Tommen.

 

* * *

 

Sansa’s breath hitched when Belisaere came into view.

“It’s beautiful,” she said, just loud enough for Rickon to hear, and he laughed.

“Bran brought me here once,” he told her as she traced the shimmering lines of the aqueducts far below them with her eyes, the delicate arches and spires of the Palace high on the hill, but most of all, there was the steady thrum of the Charter from the Great Charter Stones that Sansa knew sat in the Reservoir below the Palace. That warmth, that invisible glow, overpowered even the chill of so many deaths in such a concentrated area. “He was collecting something for Granddad, some kind of metal that’s only mined in the far north. We stayed at an inn with a lemon tree outside.”

“We’ll be staying at the Palace now,” Sansa said, stomach clenching with worry – she’d asked Jon about his father’s family while she was at the Tower, and he’d had little complimentary to say about most of them. “I hope we’re well received.”

“You’re Abhorsen-in-Waiting,” Rickon said, snapping his goggles into place. “If the King is rude to you, I’ll beat some respect into him.”

Sansa lowered her own goggles and whistled to the Paperwing to begin their descent – the cold winds and the snow had left her with a sore throat and a blocked nose, and she didn’t trust her voice enough to sing them down. Rickon, of course, had no such reservations, and cheerfully belted out what marks he knew were needed of him (for once, there seemed no unexpected force behind the soft breeze he called in off the sea, and Sansa was as thankful for that as she was for the absence of any scent of burning metal) as they soared gently lower, towards the platform the stretched out behind the Palace, hidden from the city.

 

* * *

 

Elia held tight to Aegon’s wrist, glancing around him at Oberyn, who seemed as concerned as she felt. It wasn’t right, a lad of twenty-five having visions as often as the elders who’d retired to Dreaming Rooms – Elia remembered when she’d worked in the Infirmary, before marrying Rhaegar, remembered the days when Olenna could hardly speak she was so immersed in her Sight. She did not want that for Aegon, but that was where he was headed, and Rhaegar refused to see it, refused to allow Aegon to go to the Glacier and train his gift.

The blue-and-silver Paperwing that was circling lazily down to the platform was part of Elia’s worries – this daughter of the Abhorsen’s who was to marry Aegon, they knew nothing about her aside from her name and that, according to what Aegon had Seen (and heard from his half-brother) she looked entirely like the Wallmakers, without any of the Abhorsens’ fine features or striking colouring.

“It’s not her,” Aegon said suddenly, his wrist tense under Elia’s fingers. “She’s coming with Jon and- and a girl with green hair? I don’t know who she is.”

Sure enough, the two who climbed down from the Paperwing when it landed were emphatically _not_ Aegon’s bride-to-be. The first down was a boy, all too-long limbs and untidy hair when he tugged off his flight cap, and then he turned and offered his hand to a tall, slender girl with a braid the same bright red as his own curls and a bandoleer across her chest (not that it was visible, of course, but Elia knew it was there. It had to be there).

 _Not a girl,_ Elia thought, watching Rhaegar carefully. _The Abhorsen-in-Waiting._

They laughed between themselves as they pulled off goggles (blue-tinted, everything in blue) and oilskins and tugged their furs and coats closer around themselves before buckling on their swords (two for the boy, how curious to see someone carrying twin blades now) and shouldering their packs.

And still they did not turn to greet their hosts, which Elia found somewhere between amusing and irritating – bravado was all well and good, but Rhaegar _was_ king, and he deserved respect. But the Abhorsen-in-Waiting and the boy, who was presumably one of her brothers, they turned and laid a bare hand each on the Paperwing’s nose, lingering for a long moment, before finally making their way across the platform.

Both were wind-burned across the cheeks, with deep red ridges on their noses and around their eyes from their goggles, but those fine Abhorsen’s feature – the straight nose, the strong, high cheekbones, the slightly over-large eyes and slightly too-sharp chin – were clearly in evidence.

“Sire,” the girl said, dropping into a neat curtsy even though she was wearing fitted leather breeches and boots that came to the middle of her thighs rather than skirts or a gown. The boy bowed low from the waist, and they rose together and smiled and Elia noticed for the first time just how young the boy was, with his silver-blue eyes that were neither Abhorsen nor Wallmaker but somehow both together. “I am the Abhorsen-in-Waiting, and this is my brother, Rickon. It is an honour to be here.”

“It is a pleasure to welcome you,” Rhaegar said, blessedly steady for once. “Belisaere is yours, my lady.”

A quick round of introductions – sped along by the well-concealed but still obvious shivers of the two visitors, and Elia was glad that she had thought to call for baths and hot drinks to be prepared in their rooms as soon as they had been sighted – ended in Oberyn offering his arm to the girl with a grin, and Daenerys doing the same to the boy, Rickon.

“I did not expect to see you here, Oberyn,” the girl said, to Elia’s surprise – her brother had not given any hint that he was familiar with the Abhorsen-in-Waiting. “All is well with the Clayr, I hope? I’m afraid I left in such a hurry that I hardly had time to say farewell to half of you who were so kind to me during my stay.”

“Given the circumstances, it was more than understandable, Sansa,” Oberyn said, patting her hand where it was tucked into his elbow. “I do have something for you that you left behind in your hurry, though – a special gift from a special friend. Tyrion sends his regards also.”

 _“Oberyn,”_ Rhaenys chided, falling into step beside her uncle and the Abhorsen-in-Waiting – Sansa, so that was the girl’s name, Elia hadn’t stopped to think about her once she had been ruled out as a potential bride for Aegon – and grinning. “You mustn’t tease the Abhorsen-in-Waiting.”

 

* * *

 

Sansa didn’t dare linger as long as she would have liked in the bath – her every muscle ached from the days spent cramped in the Paperwing, especially with Rickon’s lanky frame taking up so much room, and sleeping rough at night – and dressed quickly in one of her favourite dresses just for comfort’s sake. Oberyn and Princess Daenerys had been much easier company than the royal family proper, of course, because they were just as Jon had warned.

Well, except the Queen. Jon had never had much to do with the Queen, for obvious reasons, and Sansa had been relieved to find her a quiet, polite, and above all _kind_ woman, something that had struck her even though they had hardly spent ten minutes in each other’s company. Rickon had agreed, in the brief few minutes they’d talked before giving in to the lure of hot tea and hotter baths.

There was a parcel wrapped in heavy brown paper sitting on her bed that she hadn’t noticed before, and she approached it warily – it was unlikely that something tainted by Free Magic would have reached her here in the Palace, where there was security almost as intensive as at the House, but she couldn’t be too careful ( _Rickon casting red-gold marks that glowed like the Charter but burned like Free Magic)_.

It was a book. Just a book. She was relieved still, and sat down heavily on the edge of the bed before untying the string holding the paper together and-

“What in the world is he doing, sending me this?” she gasped, running her hand down the grey-white leather of Nicholas Sayre’s journal. There was a note or a letter, too, in an envelope of thick, smooth paper with her name written on the front in strong, elegant handwriting. “Surely this shouldn’t leave the Library.”

That didn’t stop her from opening it and turning through the pages with the same reverence she’d felt the first time Willas had shown it to her. She’d hardly had a moment to spare since then, a moment to think, but when she came across the page with her own mark drawn there, plain as day, she remembered the way Willas’ long fingers had stroked the page and her face felt hot. It had been such a strangely intimate gesture, made even more intimate by how unusually bold it had been for shy, reserved Willas, and-

“Sanny? Can I come in?”

“The door is unlocked, Rickon,” she called, flicking to a safer page and hoping Rickon would ascribe the pink of her cheeks to the heat of her room. “Come on.”

Rickon was in blue as well, with clean breeches and boots and his hair combed, for once.

“Jon doesn’t look like any of them,” he said without preamble. “And he doesn’t talk like them, neither.”

“Doesn’t talk like them _either,”_ she corrected absently, turning through more pages and smiling at a sketch of Mogget. “No, he doesn’t, but he _was_ raised at the Tower – he has a Borderlander’s accent, as do you and Bran and Father and Granddad and the rest.”

“Still, it’s a bit odd to finally meet Jon’s father and see nothing of Jon in him.”

“Everyone always says there’s nothing of Father in me,” Sansa reasoned, glancing up and smiling at how Rickon was fiddling with the hem of his shirt where it poked down under his tunic. “Are you nervous of the King? Rickon, he’ll have so many people to speak with that he won’t even remember you and I are here! Don’t be surprised if Prince Aegon comes looking for you, though – no doubt he’ll want to know all about Arya.”

Sansa wasn’t certain what she’d expected of Jon’s sister and brother, but it certainly wasn’t what she’d found – Rhaenys wasn’t near so sharp as he’d told her to expect, was in fact very like Oberyn and Arianne in her warmth and tendency to tease. Then again, Sansa supposed that she might be sharper towards any children Father had had with other women while married to Mother than she was towards everyone else, so perhaps that wasn’t so surprising.

Aegon, though… Jon had always been fond of his older brother, if not close to him, but this Aegon was not the man Jon spoke of with such warmth. He was distant and distracted, and stayed close to the Queen at all times.

“They’re a bit boring,” Rickon whispered, “but I think Princess Daenerys is alright.”

“Jon is very fond of her,” Sansa agreed with a smile, forcing herself to set aside the journal and tucking the letter under her pillow before Rickon could snag it out of her lap. “They’re quite close – I think they write to one another quite often.”

“He says his uncle is fun,” Rickon said, standing up and offering Sansa his hand. She smiled as she took it – Rickon had always seemed to enjoy treating her as a lady, which had always struck everyone as odd considering how utterly wild he usually was. “I look forward to meeting him.”

“Edmure should be with him,” Sansa pointed out with another smile. “Come on, then – Father and Bran might have arrived since we did, we’d best get a move on.”

 

* * *

 

“What was it?” Cersei asked urgently, fingers drumming on the hilt of her sword as she stood at Myrcella’s bedside and watched anxiously while old Olenna investigated the wounds in her daughter’s side and stomach. “This thing that attacked you and Tommen?”

“There were two of them,” Myrcella said, voice tight with the effort of not crying in front of her grandfather. “They were… Too tall, and sort of wrongly shaped? I think- ow! – I think they were Dead. Greater Dead. They had sort of silvery fires where their eyes should have been, and-“

“Did you hear names, child?” Cersei moved closer to Myrcella when Arthur spoke. The Captain of the Guard was furious, everyone could see that, but his anger didn’t seem to be for Myrcella, which was a small mercy. “Was there anything we might use to identify them? Did they mention who it was awoke them out of Death?”

Myrcella shook her head, biting down hard on her lip.

“One- the smaller one, the one that laughed, he c-called the other one something,” she whispered, giving in and letting her tears fall. Cersei stood firmly between Myrcella and Arthur, daring him to upset her daughter further, daring him to draw this out any longer and to stop them all from flying out to find Tommen. “He called him Father, I think.”

Arthur’s eyes went wide then, and Cersei knew why – she knew what he was thinking.

“Roose and Ramsay,” he said, swallowing hard before turning on his heel and marching from the Infirmary, already shouting orders to the two waiting outside the door for him. One was Humfrey, the Old Man’s youngest son, and the other was Obara, the Viper’s eldest girl. Both lethal, different as night and day though they were. “Cersei, if you intend on coming, come now!” he shouted back, and Cersei only had time to kiss Myrcella’s hair and promise that she’d bring Tommen back before dashing out to follow the rest of the Guard.

If it was Roose and Ramsay, if it truly was those two _creatures,_ then Cersei knew Tommen would be everyone else’s last priority, but him and Myrcella and Joff would always be her first priority. Always.

 

* * *

 

“Father! We didn’t know you’d already arrived!”

Sansa led Rickon after her by the hand, skipping down the steps to greet their father and Bran, who seemed as uncertain of the royal family as they were themselves.

“We got in this morning, ahead of that snowstorm at lunchtime,” Bran said, thumping Rickon squarely in the ribs when Rickon reached out to ruffle Bran’s hair – it was a bone of contention between them that Rickon stood near six inches taller than Bran, despite being four years younger than him. “And I’d guess that Jon and Arya and Wylla’ll be here… Oh, tomorrow morning? If they set out when Mother said they would. She should be here the day after, just in time for the Princess’ wedding.”

“Have any of you seen Jorah?” Father asked, absentmindedly patting Sansa’s shoulder (she wasn’t wearing her bells, but she was wearing a surcoat, a formal silk one, just as everyone else in the room was. She and Rickon were the only ones in blue, and Rickon’s was edged in Wallmaker gold). “I must speak to him.”

Father drifted off, leaving Sansa with her little brothers (it annoyed Bran that she was taller than him, too, but he’d taken his height from Father and none of the Wallmakers were all that tall) and the desperate need to find someone to talk to – they were saved, unexpectedly, by Princess Daenerys.

“Your father has commandeered my husband-to-be, so I thought it best I commandeer his children,” she said brightly, linking her arm through Sansa’s and beckoning for Rickon and Bran to follow them. “My brother is due to arrive this evening, ahead of schedule, for once – I think your uncle is with him? Edmure?”

“I believe so,” Sansa said, feeling breathless from the sheer force of Daenerys’ smile. “I-“

“And do remember to call me Dany, everybody does. Now then, you must tell me-“

All conversation was cut off by the slam of the enormous doors back against the walls of the great hall, and by the laughter of the two men who rode through on horseback.

Sansa buried her face in her hands when she recognised the tufty red hair and the deep blue surcoat, and was unsurprised when Daenerys did the same for the sleek pale blonde hair and red silk.

“Well,” Daenerys said, linking her arm through Sansa’s again as Edmure and Viserys swept forward to greet the King and Queen, bumping against one another’s shoulders and laughing even as they bowed low. “It seems my brother and your uncle have arrived.”


	3. A Courtly Interlude

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is overdue and short and like kind of fillery i'm sorry

Only after a disgusting amount of alcohol, a violent hangover, and a great deal of fresh orange juice did Willas begin to feel human again. The Watch, once an honour and a reasonably easy task, had become the single most horrible part of every Awakened Clayr's life – aside from the ones who'd gone out to find Cersei's son, of course, who'd been away for near a week and who hadn't yet returned.

“There's talk of sending scouting parties out north,” Tyrion said, voice croaky from all that singing he'd done last night. “My father mentioned something to Jaime, apparently – what a mess this all is.”

Tyrion had been sour since his niece had returned, half-dead and without her brother. Willas knew that, if he were in Tyrion's position, he would have locked himself in his room and refused to do anything at all unless he could do something useful, so he almost felt like congratulating his friend on his sheer stubborness. 

“Has there been any word from the hunting party?” Willas asked, handing over a glass of water with a frown of concern. “Garlan said that-”

“I know what your brother said,” Tyrion snapped, and then looked guilty. “I'm sorry – it's not your fault, I'm just worried about Tommen. He's a good boy, Willas. He doesn't deserve Roose and Ramsay.”

“Nobody deserves Roose and Ramsay,” Baelor said, pushing the door of Willas' study shut behind himself and sitting down on the edge of the desk. “You were both in the Watch yesterday, I see?”

“Hellish,” Willas informed him. “Us giving ourselves brain damage is _not_ going to get around whatever it is that's blocking us, Baelor – Malora was the Voice last night, and I've _never_ been worked so hard.”

“Everyone's afraid, lad,” Baelor said with a shrug that didn't match how serious he was being. “We've not been blocked in two hundred years, more, and that's a terrifying business.”

“It's so _cold,_ ” Tyrion murmured, looking down into his water. “The Observatory is always freezing, but whenever we tried to See north, it was as if we were out atop Sunfall without a coat.”

“That's what everyone's been saying,” Baelor agreed. “Whatever this is... It's old, I think, even though a lot're saying it's brand new. So old any record of it's crumbled to dust is what I say. I just hope we can catch a glimpse before it's too late.”

 

* * *

 

Prince Viserys was precisely what Jon had warned them all to expect – absolutely mad.

He just hadn’t mentioned that it wasn’t a _bad_ sort of madness.

Sansa had watched in fascination as he’d greeted the Queen with a kiss to either cheek after sweeping her clean off her feet into a crushing embrace, as he’d swept past the King with barely an acknowledgement, as he’d held Prince Aegon tight before taking his face and speaking to him closely for a little while, as he’d spun Princess Rhaenys about by their clasped hands, as he’d scooped Princess Daenerys (Dany, remember to call her Dany) up into his arms and laughed from the sheer delight of being reunited with his little sister.

Edmure, meanwhile, had been talking quietly with the King and Queen, eyes flickering to Viserys and away again, a smile playing at the corners of his lips the whole time.

Viserys was one of the King’s ambassadors to Ancelstierre, had gone to school south of the Wall and spent half his year and more in Bain and Corvere, and Sansa supposed that if she were to spend half the year without the Charter she might be a little mad, too. Edmure had travelled with him for years now, up and down across the Wall and, when they were in the Old Kingdom, gallivanting about digging up strange magics and administering the western territories, particularly around the Red Lake and Edge. Sansa had always loved it when Edmure came to visit the House – although he always visited alone, now she thought on it – because he brought presents from his travels, and stories and jokes. He was so _bright,_ warm and good and funny and an excellent dancer, despite being woefully clumsy with a sword in his hand.

Together, he and Prince Viserys…

They wore matching sashes of deep ambassadorial purple, and both had their hair cut short in the Ancelstierran style, and it wasn’t until Sansa actually saw them together that she realised that Edmure was the prince’s lover – she wondered why he’d kept that a secret from them all for so long, and wondered if it was because of how deeply Mother distrusted the royal family (or at least, distrusted the king). They were so easy in each other’s company that Sansa found herself jealous, and twice as much when Lord Mormont arrived with Father and Dany looped her arm through his. He was an enormous man, quite a bit older than the princess and shockingly hairy, but despite his gruff manner he seemed as besotted by Dany as she clearly was by him, and softened every time he turned his attention towards her. He and Father had been friends for years, Sansa knew, just as Father had always been close to most of the Borderlands lords, and Uncle Ben's partner in the Royal Guard was Lord Mormont's cousin, according to Granddad.

Dany dragged him off to the dancefloor soon after he and Father arrived, despite his very vocal protests, and Sansa slipped her hand through Ed's elbow while Prince Viserys and Father talked in hushed voices. She heard Bain mentioned more than once, and the Perimeter, and she wondered if there was some business she ought attend to near the Wall, with Mother constantly busy in the northern end of the Kingdom.

“He's very handsome,” she whispered to Ed, who blushed bright red and grinned sheepishly.

“If we're so obvious as that, it's no wonder everyone in Corvere detests me,” he said, shaking his head. “Although in fairness, we do play up on it when we know it will bother certain unwelcoming hosts.”

“You should introduce him to Mother,” Sansa advised. “She'll be very hurt that you've kept this a secret – and don't try to worm out of it by saying Mother hates the royal family.”

“Well, if she can abide you flirting with a Clayr, I don't see why me with a Prince should be an issue,” he teased, and now it was Sansa's turn to blush. “Did you know that I'm friends with Renly Baratheon, and that Renly Baratheon has been seeing a young Clayr named Loras whenever his duties allow for years now?”

“Loras?!” Sansa gasped, clapping a hand over her mouth in surprise. “He never said!”

“Maybe that's because, according to him and that sister of his, you were too busy ogling their oldest brother.”

“ _Edmure!”_

“Whose eldest brother was Sansa ogling?” Bran asked, tucking his chin over Sansa's shoulder and smiling. “Do you have a suitor, Sanny? Will Rickon and I have to threaten anyone?”

“No! Edmure is- He's being ridiculous!”

“Is that why you had a package from the Glacier waiting for you when we arrived?” Rickon asked, all innocence save the fact that his hands were folded behind his back, which Rickon _always_ did when he was misbehaving. “A book, I think it was, and you were certain to hide the letter that came with it-”

“Shut _up,_ Rickon!” Sansa hissed, slapping his arm and hiding her face against Edmure's shoulder. “It was just- just something I left behind!”

“She has an admirer,” Edmure said, “but by all reports he's far to shy to actually court her-”

“Who's courting Sansa?” Father asked, and Sansa wished she could disappear she was so embarrassed. “Nobody has mentioned anything to me-”

“Because nobody is courting me!” Sansa insisted. “Edmure is trying to divert attention away from his and Prince Viserys' relationship-”

“Already hiding me away like a dirty little secret, Ed?” Viserys himself asked cheerfully, throwing his arm around Edmure's shoulders and grinning. “Pardon me for the informal greeting, my lady, but I rather used up all my patience for formality on my brother, I'm afraid.”

“It's a pleasure to meet you,” Sansa said, reasonably sincerely – Jon had always been wary of his uncle, and she thought that perhaps she could see why. He had been perfectly charming to everyone, and Ed wouldn't have anything to do with him if he were _bad,_ but there had been a venom in the way he'd looked at the King that had stunned Sansa. “I have heard much.”

“Probably that I'm more than half mad, and a loose canon with a short temper to boot, I'll bet,” Viserys laughed. “I suppose I'd best excuse Ed, at least – we have to be very careful about who we're talking to if we act even half so married as we ought to be, if I had my way.”

“Viserys-”

“Weddings are wonderful things!” the prince exclaimed, grinning widely before tugging Edmure down for a quick kiss. “Now, my sister is on her way back, and I intend on dancing with her, so I suggest you take your niece out and spin her about as best you can for a minute – my lady, an honour.”

Sansa managed an “um” before the prince swept away, meeting Princess Daenerys and Lord Mormont as they returned from the dancefloor and sweeping his sister back out into the tangle of dancers.

Edmure smiled sheepishly again.

“He's on high doh at the moment,” he admitted. “He hates having to be near Rhaegar – never forgave him for being unfaithful to the Queen, y'see, he's been very close to her ever since his mother died, not that he ever talks about it if he can help it, and that makes him sharp towards the King, I suppose. Holds the most monumental grudges, does Viserys.”

“The First Ambassador,” Bran said, mocking Edmure's Ancelstierre-flavoured accent. “Does that make you the Second Ambassador, Ed, or are you Prince Viserys' consort?”

“Neither, thanks ever so,” Edmure laughed, rolling his eyes. “I'm a member of our diplomatic corps, but I don't have an official title – just a pretty purple sash that mercifully doesn't clash with my Abhorsen blues. Just about everything else in the world seems to clash with the damn things.”

Sansa rather liked her _Abhorsen blues,_ but she supposed she had a tendency to wear blue and silver and black and white and little else, not that she'd ever given it much thought before.

“What's Ancelstierre like, Ed?” she asked, unable to completely hide the longing from her voice – she supposed it was all those years spent cooped up in the House, but she'd always wanted to travel and see the world. Before Robb's death, she'd thought that she might work at something similar to what Edmure did while not in Ancelstierre, and in a fit of madness had once even contemplated joining the Royal Guard, like Benjen had when he was younger than she was now.

She had quickly dismissed that idea – the notion of endless drills and patrols such as Ben endured made Sansa's head ache, and besides, she was not so easy in company as her brothers and Arya, or her uncles and Lyanna, and the Guard were very much a force of the people. She was too much like her father for that.

“Smokey,” Edmure said grimly. “They have all these new-fangled machines, and _factories_ – be glad that all those automatons and things you Wallmakers make are so clean and quiet,” he added, looking to Father. “Charter, you can hardly see the sky in parts of Corvere, they're so polluted. Some of those mad Our Country lot, you know the ones, the mad xenophobes who think Viserys and I should be burned at the stake because we're foreign rather than what we get up to behind closed doors, which is at least refreshing, I suppose, they tried using our comparative absolute lack of pollution as an example of all the ways we're slacking on our end of the trade agreements. Clean water and air are apparently commodities to be bought and sold, rather than a product of our not burning coal in enormous furnaces for hours on end every damn day of the year.”

Lord Mormont folded his arms and frowned deeply.

“That could explain the problems along the border, I suppose,” he said grimly. “Naught but refugees – the Perimeter is overrun with Ancelstierrans with Kingdom blood trying to get north.”

“They wouldn't survive a day in the Borderlands,” Father said. “Not to mention anyone trying to cross the Wall itself without help is an idiot, especially someone without a Charter mark.”

Sansa held tighter to Edmure's arm, unable to shake the memory of that hot metal smell and the red-dark light of Rickon's magic at Nestowe, and it wasn't until Bran pinched her elbow that she realised she'd stopped talking or even listening.

“Pardon me,” she said, smiling weakly. “We had a tough journey, and I am tired. You were saying?”

Conversation drifted towards the nameless threat to the north that was driving the wildmen south, and Sansa suddenly remembered something Tyrion had told her while she was at the Library. 

“ _One reason everyone is so excited about the prospect of a child being born with you as its mother and one of us as its father is that, the last time there was something we couldn't see, it was a half-Clayr Abhorsen that won the day.”_

“ _Lirael Goldenhand,”_ Sansa had gasped in response, amazed at the thought of any child of hers being a figure of legend like her famous ancestress. Tyrion had simply nodded and carried on without elaborating, but it had given Sansa a great deal to consider – she hated the idea of not only her life, but the very _existence_ of any children she might have being preordained, but at the same time, what if she doomed everyone by resisting this vision of Tyrion's, of her wedding a Clayr? How could she ever do that?

“-and the Clayr won't tell anyone what they've Seen,” Edmure complained as she pushed herself back into conversation, which made her frown.

“That's because they haven't Seen _anything,_ Edmure,” she said sternly. “The ranks of the Watch were growing every day while I was staying at the Glacier. They're worried, because something is blocking their Sight – I was there, I spoke with more than one Voice of the Nine Day Watch, as well as dozens of other Clayr. They're doing everything in their power, but they are not infallible.”

 

 

* * *

 

Cersei stood with Arthur and his lieutenants – there were only the four of them left of the near twenty who'd set out to find Tommen, to find Roose and Ramsay, and it seemed to get colder every single day.

They'd been picked off one by one – there'd been Dead everywhere, and Cersei had been glad of that Death-sense Obara had so strongly, more strongly than anyone else without Abhorsen blood that Cersei had ever met, which had felt the Dead around them in time for them to build fires and diamonds of protection.

“There's something fogging my Sight,” Humfrey growled, rubbing his eyes as he sat up. “I've tried tracking the Dead, but nothing – just cold and a headache, Charter curse them.”

“It's the same as whatever's blocking the Watch,” Arthur said through tightly gritted teeth. “If we don't find them tomorrow, we're turning back and sending for the Abhorsen – and don't give me that look, Cersei. I know we promised we'd do our best to save your son, but we have to consider the whole of the Clayr. If this _is_ Roose and Ramsay, and it certainly looks as though it is, we need to destroy them, and we can't do that without the Abhorsen.”

“And probably some of the Wallmakers, too,” Obara agreed, turning her head until her neck clicked, the sound startlingly loud in the icy gloom. “We should move on, I think.”

“But we've only just-”

“There are Dead – strange Dead, I don't think they're just Hands.”

None of them argued with her – instead, they each shouldered their packs, loosened their swords, and conjoured a handful of Charter marks to burn and break and bind.

Somewhere beyond the next snow-bound ridge, a dark light flared, and a sudden fear seized Cersei – if that was Roose and Ramsay, was Tommen with them? Was her little fat boy still alive?

If he was alive, would she be able to do anything but be merciful when she found him?

 

* * *

 

“Our uncle speaks highly of you, sir,” Sansa said with a smile, bending her knees just slightly – as Abhorsen-in-Waiting, the only people she actually needed to curtsy for were the King and Queen, the Wallmaker (as _if_ Granddad would expect that of her) and the Voice of the Nine Day Watch, but the gesture was a flattery in and of itself, and it never hurt to flatter influential people who she may someday need to work with, like Barristan Selmy, Lord Commander of the Royal Guard. “It is a pleasure to meet you.”

“And you, my lady,” he returned, bowing further than she'd curtised and smiling. He had the lightest blue eyes Sansa had ever seen, and looked far too old to be still active – Ben sometimes called him “Sir Grandfather,” but it was said with such respect and affection that Sansa knew that this man could command absolute loyalty from his guards. “I met your brother only a few times, but I have no doubt you will match him.”

She liked that – so many people forgot themselves and sympathised over Robb's death, despite convention leading that you _never_ sympathised on the death of an Abhorsen or Abhorsen-in-Waiting, but Selmy had managed to honour Robb without insulting Sansa. _Edmure could do with a few lessons in diplomacy from him,_ she thought, and tugged slightly on Rickon's arm to draw his attention.

“This is my youngest brother, Rickon,” she said, kicking him in the ankle when he _still_ didn't pay attention. “As you can see, he is still childish enough to be overwhelmed by court.”

“I am _not_ childish,” Rickon said firmly, finally turning to face Selmy. “I'm youthful and enthusiastic.”

“And rude,” she added. “Please excuse him, sir, he is-”

“Very like your uncle,” Selmy said with a smile. “Or uncles, rather – all of them.”

Sansa had no choice but to agree – Rickon might look more like her than even Robb had, but beyond that they had next to nothing in common aside from a special fondness for sour-sweet green apples. 

“It was a pleasure to meet you, my lady, but I'm afraid you must excuse me – the King has need of me.”

True enough, the King was beckoning Sir Barristan from across the room, leaving Sansa and Rickon somewhat at a loss – Bran had been accosted by Princess Rhaenys, who looked a great deal like her mother but had the same sort of manic energy as the two of her uncles that Sansa had met, Father was still deep in conversation with Lord Mormont, Prince Viserys, Princess Daenerys and Ed. 

“Who shall we introduce ourselves to next?” Rickon asked, feigning enthusiasm and then yawning hugely into his hand. “Isn't Aunt Lysa's husband about here somewhere? Maybe Robin is about-”

“My lady, my lord.”

They turned together, surprised by the sudden and unnoticed appearance of Prince Aegon. _Arya's betrothed,_ Sansa thought, eyeing the prince critically. _She'll eat him alive and still be hungry for breakfast._

He was tall, and built the same lean, long-limbed way as Jon, but slighter, less muscular – which was only to be expected, she supposed, given that Jon spent so much time working on large projects with Brandon, who insisted on manual labour where possible, because he felt it leant greater integrity to the finished product than using all magic. 

Aegon had his father's fair hair and violet-blue eyes, but his mother's golden skin, and he was quite handsome in a delicate, pretty sort of way. He also looked incredibly nervous, and Sansa couldn't help but wonder why in the world the King wanted the twitching Prince as his heir instead of Princess Rhaenys, who was so inherently capable that Sansa could almost have been convinced to hand over her bells to her.

“Your highness,” she said, dragging Rickon down into a bow when she curtsied. “It is a pleasure to meet you-”

“There is no need for such formality,” he said, biting his lip anxiously. “We are to be family soon enough – indeed, we already are, of a sort. Through Jon.”

Sansa was surprised by that – she knew that Jon got along well with his brother, but she still hadn't expected Aegon to mention him in such close proximity to the Queen. 

“He will be here tomorrow morning,” Aegon said, smiling slightly and looking less nervous. “He wrote to say that he finally asked Lady Manderly to marry him – he has been mooning after her for years now.”

“That's true enough,” Sansa agreed with a grin. “My brother was as bad with her sister, although Jon's excuses always rang hollow when compared with Robb's, I have to say.”

Aegon's smile widened just a little, glancing about as if afraid of being caught.

“My sister was near as bad after your uncle, until she realised he was a lad,” he confided, amusement bright in his dark eyes. “She was quite mortified when she found him kissing our uncle in the gardens.”

Sansa and Rickon laughed at that, and the prince did as well – he had a good laugh, bright and carrying – and Sansa hoped that this impression of him was the true one. This was the man Jon spoke of with such fondness, she was sure – quiet, yes, but still a young man, not the frightened ghost that had greeted them on the Paperwing platform.

“Jon says your sister has the Wallmaker look?” Aegon said curiously once they had all calmed down. “I admit that I have Seen her, but it is not the same as seeing her for myself. Does she look like Jon?”

“Bizarrely so,” Rickon said firmly. “She's more like his mother than he is- Oops.”

Aegon's smile dipped slightly, but only slightly.

“You would do well not to mention your aunt in front of my father, but those of us who must live with him know well enough that it was unlikely Lady Lyanna had much say in their affair – and besides, without it, Rhaenys and I would not have Jon, would we?” His smile spread again, warming his face and putting a dimple in his left cheek. “I have yet to meet anyone who doesn't like your aunt – is your sister like her in her manner?”

 

* * *

 

Jon barely managed to stay on his feet when Aegon tackled him, both of them laughing as they wrestled back and forth, clearly delighted to see one another. Aegon had told Sansa last night that he had not seen his brother in over a year, and Sansa realised that it had been near as long since last she'd seen Bran before Robb's Farewell.

She thumped Jon in the chest when he bowed to her and called her Abhorsen-in-Waiting, which seemed to amuse not only him and Aegon, but also Arya and Wylla Manderly, who barely managed to stay on her feet after nearly falling out of the Paperwing, her bright green hair half fallen out of her flight cap.

Arya and Aegon stood facing one another while Jon steadied Wylla, and Sansa held tight to Rickon's wrist when he moved to step between them.

“A pleasure, my lady,” the prince said, bowing his head.

To Sansa's eternal surprise, Arya curtsied, a _proper_ curtsy, even holding her skirts properly.

“The pleasure is mine, your highness.”

Aegon raised an eyebrow, looking vaguely confused.

“I must say,” he said, seeming thoughtful, “you are not what I was given to expect, Lady Arya.”

Arya folded her arms, looking incredulous.

“For those of us without the benefit of the Sight,” she said archly, “what _were_ you expecting?”

 

* * *

 

To everyone's evident surprise, Aegon seemed to be getting along well enough with Arya. Dany was as surprised as Rhaenys.

Or Elia.

“Aegon has always been so quiet that I never expected him to like someone so... forthright.” Elia murmured behind her cup, gold and white ribbons shining around her wrist. “Then again, she reminds me somewhat of you, Daenerys.”

“She reminds me more of Obara,” Rhaenys whispered, smiling behind her hand as she watched Aegon argue with the girl. “She's _feisty_ ,” 

And it was true – the girl had paid little mind to Rhaegar, which had left him astonished, and had been polite but not deferential to everyone else. She was oddly refreshing, and very like the Abhorsen in her manner. 

Perhaps it wasn't such a surpise that she and Aegon were getting along – Aegon was very like Elia, and Elia had always gotten along well with the Abhorsen.

Jon was sitting with them, too, his pretty lady at his side, and the Abhorsen-in-Waiting and both her brothers.

It seemed strange that Aegon's bride-to-be was their sister. She neither looked nor behaved much like them – she was like a more brash Jon, as far as Dany could see.

“She always spent more time at the Wallmaker's Tower than at the Abhorsen's House,” Jorah grumbled, shrugging. “Ned always did say the one thing he and Cat worried about when they wed was that the children would be torn between the two, but they seemed to manage well enough.”

Rhaenys and Elia leaned back in their chairs at that, but Jorah didn't seem to notice his mistake. He rarely did, and he rarely worried about making them. _It must be a Borderlander thing_ , Daenerys decided, watching Aegon reel in astonishment at something Arya said. 

 

* * *

 

Sansa knew from the moment Arya saw Aegon that she was unimpressed – maybe she'd been expecting someone more like Jon, but everything Arya particularly liked about their cousin came from the Wallmakers, as far as Sansa could see.

Oh, they were getting along alright, but Sansa knew Arya well enough to know that Arya found Aegon amusing more than anything, because he was a novelty. She just hoped that Arya did not do something to embarrass the poor man before the wedding – theirs or Princess Daenerys', although the liklihood of her lasting til their wedding at Midwinter was...

Jon's hand clapping over Arya's mouth echoed in the airy hall, and Sansa sighed and covered her eyes with one hand. _Typical._

 

* * *

 

Tommen had bitten through his lip the previous morning, and his captors had scolded him – scolded him, like a naughty child! - for _wasting_ his precious blood.

They had used him to break five Charter Stones already, all along the northernmost border of the realm, along the mountains, edging closer and closer to the Glacier every night.

He hoped Myrcella had gotten back to warn everyone, although he wondered, too, if she knew what she was warning them off. He'd tried to warn her, had felt the cold creeping from under his skin and known that the end was coming for one of them.

He was glad, he thought as Ramsay threw him carelessly over the newest Charter Stone, still bright and unbroken, that tonight the end would finally arrive. He had Seen it just a few hours previous, and welcomed it with every fiber of his being not hoping for his family's safety.


End file.
